


instructions on what it means to be human

by thingswithteeth



Series: perhaps the world ends here [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Apocalypse, F/F, Friendship, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Episode 160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22490725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: Four months after the world ends, Annabelle Cane and Oliver Banks meet in a Nando's.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonathan Sims & Everyone, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Oliver Banks & Annabelle Cane
Series: perhaps the world ends here [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1542487
Comments: 84
Kudos: 200





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to make the stories in this series as standalone as possible and friends, I am here to tell you that I've failed. You should probably read the other two before you proceed.

Oliver Banks isn’t really sure why he’s sitting in a Nando’s at six o’clock at night on a Tuesday four months after the end of the world, nursing his glass of water and waiting for someone to bring out his sunset burger and slice of carrot cake. He wonders a little why he’d ordered the cake. He’s never had much of a sweet tooth.

He’s not sure why he’s sitting in a Nando’s at six o’clock at night on a Tuesday four months after the end of the world, which means he knows _exactly_ why he’s here.

The server who delivers his food is in her late forties. She moves hesitantly, like a thing born new, which he supposes is fair: the whole world is new, and everything in it, including her and the rest of the patrons, most of them looking a bit dazedly at their dinners. The table of teenagers in the corner has started to get a little rowdy. Young things trust easier. They’re less afraid. One of the girls has red wrapped pulsating around her midriff—something malignant growing inside her. Liver, maybe. No, pancreas. He’s pretty good at telling them apart. He’s had practice. It’s been a while since he’s seen someone marked to die of natural causes. For the first time in years, he thinks about warning her.

Any decision he might make is forestalled when his expected, if unplanned for, dinner companion sits down across from him. She catches the edge of his desert plate with her fingertips and pulls it over to her side of the table. Ah. That’s why he’d ordered it.

“What did you do?” Oliver asks mildly. Annabelle Cane pauses with a forkful of cake halfway to her lips. “Other than use your spooky mind control powers to get me to cover the tab.” He’s a little put out by that, mostly because it hadn’t been necessary; out of the corner of his eye, he can see their server approaching the table with a beer he definitely hadn’t ordered and that neither of them had paid for.

“Do?”

He gestures briefly, at nothing and at everything: the server putting down the beer at Annabelle’s elbow, the softly lit restaurant, the girl who’s probably going to die because of something growing on her pancreas rather than someone _eating_ her pancreas, the _world_.

Annabelle smiles.

“Would you believe me if I said _nothing_?” She slides the fork between her lips and takes her time savoring the morsel—and enjoying making him wait, no doubt. “Would you believe me if I said _everything_?”

“I guess,” Oliver says, slow and thoughtful, “that would depend on which one you want me to believe.”

He can tell that she likes that answer. Her smile widens, and he smiles back at her. He likes Annabelle, for the most part. He even likes her on the days when she’s decided that mucking around with his free will is a fun game. Sometimes he worries a little that he likes Annabelle because she’s decided that she wants him to like her, but fretting over the spiders has never done anyone any amount of good and there are other reasons why he might feel a bit fond of this particular monster. She’s the only one of the lot of them with any sense, the only one other than him who had looked at the promise of a ruined world and thought, _eh, pass_.

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“Yes, please.”

She nods. Spider silk gleams silver-white against the bleached yellow-white of her hair. “Fine. But first, a toast.” She lifts her beer.

He has nothing but his water to toast with. It’s supposed to be bad luck. Toast with water and you’ll drown at sea. Oliver’s never been overly superstitious, but his boss at the occult store he’d worked at for a few years had been wild for spilled salt and knuckles against wood. Even if he was superstitious, he doesn’t suppose it would matter. He’s well past drowning being a major concern. He knocks the rim of his glass against the neck of Annabelle’s beer bottle and takes a sip. “What are we toasting?”

“To the departed,” Annabelle says, and tilts her beer at him in a wry salute before drinking. “To the Archivist.”

**

They’re two hours outside of London on foot when Daisy finds them. She’s on foot too, and being more literal about it than either Jon or Martin—she’s apparently eschewed shoes as well as outerwear. There’s something odd about the shape of her bare feet, the toes curling up against the road. She should be cold in her thin t-shirt, but she doesn’t look it. Her eyes are the same color they’ve always been, but there’s something strange and feral about the way they gleam in the forever twilight that daytime has become beneath the dim light of the Eye.

All in all, Jon understands why Martin thrusts an arm across his chest and takes then both a stumbling step backwards, but he knows— _Knows_ that Daisy doesn’t intend them any harm.

She’s got her head tilted, eyes bright and inquisitive, like _she_ doesn’t fully understand why anyone might find her appearance unnerving but is willing to play along. “All right, there?” she asks. She sounds like Daisy, like she had with her fingers brushing his inside the darkest depths of the Buried. He’d known before now that she was okay, that she’s her or something like it, had managed to push down the screams of billions of terrified and tortured souls to wrench that much information from his _god_ , but it still makes something dull and painful swell in the base of his throat.

“All right,” he says softly, and she’s still studying him closely but she bobs her head once, accepting his answer at face value.

“Come on,” she says. “Been looking for you. Basira thought you might come this way.” He wants to ask, wants to _know_ , but he’s certain he won’t like the answer from the way that the relaxed slant of Daisy’s mouth goes briefly discontent. “She’s mostly been at Georgie and Melanie’s these past couple weeks. We can head there.” She eyes Martin uncertainly, and that’s Jon’s first clue that Martin is swaying where he stands, just a little. “Might want to stop before then, though. You two look like you need it. Probably for the best. There’s a pack hunting a few miles up the road.”

“A pack of _what?_ ” Martin asks, thin and choked.

“People,” Daisy says. “Once.”

“...oh.”

It’s awful. It’s not the most awful thing they’ve seen or heard in the last two months. The screaming rises to a crescendo in Jon’s head, and he closes his eyes, trying to block it out.

“Lead the way,” he says.

**

“Hold on,” Oliver says. “That’s—that’s well before you sent me to them. You weren’t even there yet.”

“I wasn’t there. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention.” She looks at him balefully across the table. “There are spiders _everywhere,_ Ollie.”

The back of his neck prickles. “Still—.”

“Who’s telling the story?”

She sounds spider silk smooth and dangerous. He kind of likes that too, but he’s also not an idiot. “Fine.” He waves a hand. “Continue.”

**

They’re at one of Daisy’s safehouses. One of several, if Jon is any judge and if he knows Daisy at all; he would bet she has them studded across the city by now, little pockets of safety with four walls and the essentials needed to maintain life and not a whole lot else. Martin is asleep in the nest of faintly musty blankets in the next room, and Daisy has made Jon a cup of tea. It’s—it’s really quite terrible, over-steeped and too bitter even with the powdered milk she had tilted into the cup. He pretends not to see the little clots tea-soaked milk solids floating on the surface and tries very hard not to grimace every time he lifts the mug to his lips. The tea is warm, at least. He can’t remember the last time he had something warm.

(That’s a lie. There’s very little that Jon doesn’t remember these days, and half of those memories aren’t even his.)

Daisy has been silent since Martin went into the bedroom. She’s puttering around a kitchen that has too little in the cupboards and the drawers for all her bustle to be anything other than an excuse to give him time to settle in, but evidently she’s decided he’s had enough time, because she drops the pretense, grabs her own cup of tea, and sits down in the chair across from him.

She leans forward. He doesn’t mean to flinch, but her eyes are strange and she’s gained back enough of the weight she had lost back at the Archives for him to know that she’s no longer starving herself of fear. The past few weeks have been lived too much on the edge for him to trust the promise of safety. He’s not the only one. Martin isn’t actually sleeping, he’s—Jon stops himself. He’s been trying. Not to know. Not about Martin, at least not the things that Martin doesn’t mean to tell him. It’s not something Martin has asked of him, but they both have little enough left that it feels right to leave Martin with whatever he can, even if all he has to offer is the privacy of his own thoughts.

Daisy freezes.

“Sorry,” Jon says.

“It’s fine.” He doesn’t need the Beholding to know that it isn’t. “I get it.”

“Are you—okay?”

She doesn’t look away from him. Daisy has never really been one for flinching. “I’ve been better. Been a lot worse, too. I’m still here. I’m still me.” She licks her lips. “You’re a little bit scared of me right now. That helps.”

It’s an ugly kind of honesty. He probably owes her at least that much in return. “There’s a mother of two stuck in her car in Suffolk. It’s filling up with water. I don’t think she’ll make it out. Neither does she. She’s very afraid. The Buried is feeding off of it.” He’s not sure why he’s still so attached to Smirke’s Fourteen. The Fears are more or less one and the same, he knows that now. Maybe it’s the same impulse that had made him so determined to restore order to Gertrude’s disaster of an Archive: the need to categorize, to define, to _understand_. “It’s my fault.”

He’d meant to tell them. Strange as it is, after all of the uncertainty, after lying about taking statements, after _everything_ , he’d always known that if— _when_ he found Daisy and Basira again, he would tell them all of it, that he wouldn’t spare himself by sparing them the details.

“Tell me,” Daisy says.

She’s never really been one for flinching.

There’s some comfort in that. Daisy understands, better than anyone else ever could. If she thinks—if he’s a danger still, or if it’s what he deserves—.

He tells her. When he’s done, Daisy leans back in her chair.

“Goddammit.”

“I know.” At some point during the telling, he’s turned his attention back to the bobbing specks of milk powder in his mostly untouched tea. “Daisy—I—.”

“Not that.” Daisy sighs. “I think Basira just lost a bet.”

He looks at her. The wild light is still in her eyes and she looks tired, but her expression is calm. When he meets her gaze, the corner of her mouth tucks up. She reaches out, slow and careful, like _she’s_ still worried about spooking _him_ , and loosens his grip on the teacup so that she can wrap her fingers around his.

Things are getting worse for the mother of two in Suffolk. Things are—bad, for a lot of people. He can feel his breathing go ragged, and he’s caught somewhere between his own petty relief at Daisy’s easy acceptance and the dying panic of hundreds, _thousands_ of other people.

“Everyone is afraid. I can hear—.”

“Hey,” Daisy says, softer and more serious now. “Hey, now.” She breathes in, slow and deliberate. She does it again, and again, and again, until he starts to match her without really thinking about it.

“Don’t listen to it,” she says, once his breathing has evened out. It’s not so simple, but it’s easier, if he listens to Daisy’s steady breath and lets her fingers wrapped around his anchor him. “Don’t. Listen to—.”

_Listen to the quiet_.

**

It’s late when Jon stumbles into the flat’s single bedroom with its bare walls and its pile of blankets at the center, as far as it’s possible to get from the blank black holes of the uncovered windows. The plastic venetian blinds are in heaps against the skirting board. Jon wonders if that’s Daisy’s doing, or if the flat’s previous occupant had been the one to tear them down. He carefully does not wonder about what happened to the flat’s previous occupant. If he thinks the question it’s possible that he’ll know the answer, and he doesn’t really want to.

Martin really is asleep now, but he stirs when Jon opens the door. Jon is tired enough to be a little dizzy with it. Daisy shows no signs of sharing his fatigue, and having her pacing restless circles outside the bedroom door makes him feel the safest he has in—too long.

He’s barely shrugged out of his coat when Martin reaches for him, eyes still shut and fingers clumsy. Jon allows himself to be pulled down and into the pile of body warm blankets. There’s not much cushion between him and the floor, and the thin duvet he pulls halfheartedly over his hips doesn’t provide much of a shield from the cold, but he still feels some of the tension ease out of his shoulders as he scoots forward and rests his forehead against the nape of Martin’s neck. Martin’s hair feels greasy against his skin and they’re both more than a little pungent at this point, but Martin immediately drags one of Jon’s arms around his waist, and it’s—good. It feels good, like coming home.

They haven’t kissed since the last time they’d been inside one of Daisy’s safehouses. They don’t touch much during the day. But they haven’t slept a single night more than a few centimeters apart.

Jon hasn’t asked. He’s trying to respect Martin’s privacy, trying not to know the things that Martin doesn’t mean to tell him, and he’s far too aware that his questions carry more weight than most people’s.

It feels a little silly, too, to worry now over how much of Martin he’s allowed to claim. The world is ending.

(The world has ended.)

He doesn’t feel like he’s slept much at all when Daisy wakes them the next morning. He’s wondered more than once in the weeks since the world ended whether he even needs to any more, whether sleeping is some leftover habit of being more human than he is, like eating food or breathing, but Martin has been remarkably discouraging about testing the theory.

Martin looks worse than Jon feels, and Jon knows he sounds more peevish than Daisy deserves when he says, “It’s barely light out. We have to go _now_?”

Daisy doesn’t look offended. If anything, she looks a little fond. She shoves a protein bar into his hand. He would like to blame the apocalypse, but he both knows and _knows_ that this had been Daisy’s idea of breakfast even before the end times. “Better this way,” she says, and, “trust me,” and he barely has the chance to think _I do_ in a way that feels as much like determination as reflex before Martin is leaning into his shoulder and murmuring, “It’s fine, Jon,” close and easy and still half asleep. Jon feels himself flush, warm and far too pleased. He drags that warmth around him with the same determination he had put toward trusting Daisy, because this is good, good the way that Daisy’s hand twisted around his or Martin’s body soft in the dark is, and he’s fairly certain that what comes next won’t be.

The streets are dangerous. They’ll have to proceed with caution. They’ll still make it to Georgie’s flat and the others before nightfall.

He tucks the protein bar into Martin’s pack when Daisy goes to ready herself for a trek through the city and Martin slips into the bathroom to do as much of a quick clean up as he can. Jon really doesn’t need to eat anymore, and resources have been scarce. He hasn’t touched the supplies in Martin’s pack in weeks.

His own knapsack is packed full to bursting with the statements Basira had sent him from the Archives. He hasn’t really wanted to touch those, hasn’t trusted them after—just after. Hasn’t wanted to and he _hasn’t_.

He hasn’t touched the supplies in his knapsack even once since leaving Scotland.

He hasn’t needed to.

**

Basira is frowning at him a little.

Georgie is frowning at him a _lot_ , but she still sounds like she means it when she says, “It’s good to see you.” He knows she means it, because Georgie is kind but she’s never been the sort of nice that lies to spare someone’s feelings, and she’s never been afraid enough of anyone’s opinion to pad her words for the sake of cultivating a good one. It had been one of the things he liked about her, once upon a time. That hasn't changed, even if so much else has.

From where she’s standing in the circle of Martin’s arms, Melanie definitely sounds like she means it when she says, “Fuck you,” but unlike the other two she’s smiling, and she sticks out an imperious hand from beneath Martin’s armpit. Jon stares at it for a moment, uncomprehending, before realizing that she intends for him to take it.

He takes her hand, because it feels more cruel than he wants to be to her to refuse. She squeezes his fingers a little too hard and grins in his general direction while she does it, and that’s still more of a welcome than he had expected to receive. Once they’re all inside, she bestows the Admiral on him like one granting the most beneficent of favors, which—she’s not wrong.

Jon sits on the floor of Georgie’s flat with fourteen pounds of shedding, not-entirely-happy-about-being-cuddled-but-being-gracious-about-it cat, and he tells them how the world had ended. No one has much to say when he’s done.

“I want to fix it,” he says, and pretends he doesn’t know how inadequate and foolish that sounds.

They part ways soon after. Basira is sniffling surreptitiously and starting to look a little puffy-eyed after too long spent in the Admiral’s company, and Daisy tugs her out the door to the neighboring flat that is apparently now theirs. Melanie excuses herself to go to bed in a way that Jon tries very hard not to read as a bid to escape his company. Georgie directs Martin to the closet where she keeps the spare linens, and then she lingers.

“You said you were here as a friend,” she says, voice hard and pretty face resolute. There’s no _give_ in her, and he understands. He’s already taken everything she’s willing to give. He understands, but it still stings a little. “I hope you meant that, Jon.”

The last time he had come here, he had been looking for an ally. He could still use one.

Melanie had seemed good. Better than the last time he had seen her. Better than anyone should be, after the world has ended. They’ve carved themselves out some measure of safety here. “I’m just looking for a place to stay for the night,” he says, placating. He drags a hand down the Admiral’s spine and avoids her gaze. “I’ll be out of your hair soon. I promise.”

Georgie pauses, and he’s familiar with the look on her face. He’d seen it often enough at uni. It’s the one she wears when she’s measuring the risks, trying to balance the way she’s not afraid of how her words might be taken against her desire not to be unkind, but in the end she just says, “Good,” and goes into the bedroom without saying _goodnight_.

The Admiral vacates his lap to race after her, and Jon tries not the feel bereft. Martin returns just as the bedroom door is closing, and there’s a chill on his face as he watches Georgie’s departing back. “Everything all right here?”

No.

There are clean sheets in Martin’s arms and four walls that feel sufficiently safe, even without Daisy pacing outside the door, so Jon forces himself to revise his initial answer. “Well enough.”

He helps Martin make up the sofa with clumsy hands, and then they arrange themselves in such a way that they almost fit. In the morning, he startles awake to a steady _thump, thump, thump_ from beneath him. Martin has half shoved himself up, eyes wide open and anxious, one hand braced against the small of Jon’s back and the other clutching at the arm of the sofa to keep them both from ending up on the floor.

Melanie is seated on the coffee table. She gives the sofa one more solid kick for good measure. She’s grinning the way she had while squeezing his hand the night before, like she knows she’s being awful and is kind of enjoying it.

“You awake?” she asks. She pauses while Jon struggles to make his heart crawl down from his throat far enough to offer a response. “You need to say something. I can’t actually tell.”

_“Yes,”_ he grinds out.

“Good.” Melanie says. “I’ve come to tell you that I’m in. You know, with the—.” She stops. Takes a breath. “What was that you were saying about fixing the world?”


	2. Chapter 2

Morning in Georgie’s flat feels both familiar and strange. The Admiral winds through his legs and he can hear Georgie banging around in the kitchen, and for just a moment the susurrus of other people’s fear is drowned out by nostalgia: he’s in uni again, crawling warm and content out from between sheets that smell like Georgie’s perfume; he’s crammed cramped and uncomfortable onto this very same sofa, constantly surprised and constantly grateful that when he had showed up at her door she had opened it wide without asking any questions. Waking up at Georgie’s is familiar. It’s strange because Melanie is there, ducking into the bathroom and claiming the first shower as her own.

“It’s not warm,” she says, “but it’s—eh, tolerably tepid.”

It’s strange because Martin is there to slant a look at Jon and say, “Bagsy,” but in such a way that it’s clear the second shower is Jon’s for the asking if he really wants it. He shrugs a shoulder and tries not to smile, and doesn’t remember he’s made a mistake by stepping into the kitchen until Georgie is staring at him from across half a loaf of bread and a long, serrated knife.

“Sorry,” he says, and isn’t even sure what he’s apologizing for. With anyone else it would be for startling her with his presence, but Georgie doesn’t startle.

“It’s fine,” Georgie says, turning her frown from him to the bread. “Odd. One of the neighbors baked this yesterday.” The raw end of the loaf is covered with mold, thick and green edged in white, and Jon is distantly grateful that he no longer needs to eat.

“The power isn’t out?”

“It is. Most of the time, at least. Maybe not for long; Basira is working on that. There’s a grill in the back, though. Been there for ages. Left behind by some previous tenant, I think. You’d be amazed what Cameron can do with a grill and that fancy dutch oven he’s so in love with. Amanda had a camp stove, and I’ve grabbed a couple more since. It beats getting by on cold beans, at least.”

“It seems as though you’ve managed better than most, here,” Jon says. “I would expect you to want to—.”

The knife clicks sharp against the cutting board as she sets it down. “To what? Stay safe? Stay out of it?” She sighs. “We’re all in it now, Jon. Whether we want to be or not.”

Jon opens his mouth, but he’s not sure what to say to that. Georgie’s gaze is steady, but it’s also disaffected, very nearly cold. It’s a look that almost reminds him of the way his grandmother had so often looked, but no, no, that’s not quite right. His grandmother had tried, but she had never quite been able to muster—that doesn’t matter. She’d looked at him the same on the day that he had arrived on her doorstep as she had on the day he left. Really, it mostly reminds him of talking to Tim, in those bad days before the end. Georgie wears her anger softer than Tim ever had, but seeing it still feels like a loss, an absence of something he hadn’t quantified well enough to think he would miss it until it was gone. Affection, he supposes.

“Sorry,” he says again, uselessly, and this time he knows why he’s saying it.

She sighs again, harsher this time. “Jon—.”

“Jon.”

They both turn toward Basira.

“Martin let me in. Could use your help with something,” she says. Her voice is mild, but the flat is small enough that he doesn’t doubt she’d heard most of it, if not the whole. “If you’re free?”

He is deeply appreciative of any excuse to leave this kitchen that doesn’t involve actually having to come up with an excuse to leave this kitchen. “Certainly.”

Twenty minutes later, he’s regretting his decision a little as he tries to brace a rather massive portable generator while Basira slides it out of the bed of a pickup truck. “You do realize,” he gasps, “that I was—perhaps—not the ideal choice to assist you with this.”

Basira grunts. “I know.” She shoves the generator back up and pauses, sweat beading at her hairline and her chest rising and falling with exertion. “Mostly I just wanted an excuse to talk to you. Alone.”

That doesn’t sound good. “All right.”

“Tell me you have a plan.”

It takes Jon a moment to find the words. “Are _you_ ,” he says, each word distinct, “asking me if I have a _plan_?”

He expects her anger. After he had come out of his coma, it had often seemed like there was nothing they had to offer each other beyond anger and recriminations. He’s a little surprised when she snorts out something that might be a laugh, quick and abortive and nothing like a laugh should be but recognizable nonetheless. “Fair. Doesn’t change anything, though. We’re clinging to the edge here, Jon. We can’t afford wrong moves, not if we don’t want to get pushed over.”

There’s a man in a block of flats half a mile away. He’s kept safe well enough for the past few months, but that’s over now. The feeling of tiny legs crawling across his skin makes him want to scream, but he’s trying not to, because he knows that if he screams they’ll crawl into his wide open mouth. Jon presses a hand against the edge of the truck bed to steady himself and tries hard not to gag, and for a moment he’s so focused on the secondhand fear pouring into and him that he doesn’t realize Basira is speaking.

When he comes back to himself he finds Basira standing closer than she had been before, one hand wrapped around his shoulder and his name on her lips.

“Daisy told me,” he says, and then stops. Tries again. “Daisy said that you’d lost a bet. With Melanie. About me.”

Basira is looking at him closely. There’s something a little too intent about her gaze, like she’s not looking at him but through him, something that whispers _marked_ in the back of his skull, and it doesn’t make him scared, it just makes him sad. She hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t wanted this for her. He doesn’t mention it, and she doesn’t ask him why he’s half leaning against the truck. They owe each other that much. “So Melanie keeps telling me,” Basira says, instead. “I don’t think it counts as a bet if we never set any stakes. I’m not even sure what she thinks she’s won.”

“What was the bet?”

“Oh, don’t.” When Jon says nothing, she huffs out a breath. “Before—all this. She said something about you ending the world. I told her it wasn’t going to happen. Don’t—don’t read too much into it. She wasn’t serious. She’s still not serious. No one saw this coming, she’s just trying to find something to laugh about in an awful situation. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“I’m not upset,” Jon says, although he thinks he might be, a little. “I’m just surprised you didn’t bet against me.”

Basira isn’t looking at him anymore. “I thought you were out of it. Maybe not so far out of it as Melanie was, not free and clear, especially not with Elias still waiting in the wings, but I thought you were far enough and safe enough for us to have time to figure it out. You and Martin both.” She boosts herself up onto the bed of the truck, her back resting against the generator and close enough that her thigh bumps against his elbow. “I was wrong. You weren’t safe, so now none of us are safe. I sent you that statement, too. You going to blame me for the end of the world?”

“You couldn’t have known—.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” She shakes her head. “Everything’s wrong. We’ve all got things we’ve _done_ wrong, whether by accident or—well, we both know what Daisy was, don’t we? I love her, but we both know. We both know I didn’t do anything then, that I let her get away with—a lot, gave her a lot of leeway I didn’t give you or anyone else. Maybe none of us deserve to be forgiven, even for the accidents and the things we didn’t mean. But I can’t _undo_ any of that by being mad at you, and I don’t blame you. Just like you don’t blame me.”

Jon breathes out slowly. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Basira says again. She claps him on the shoulder, rough and awkward, and twists to look at the generator. She sighs. “Do me a favor? Go inside and get me Daisy. You were right. You’re not the best person to be helping me with this. Anjana Ghosh, too. I’ll need her to hook this thing up. First floor, can’t miss it, there’s this robot thing her kid drew on the front door.”

Anjana Ghosh is tired. She’s spent half the night every night since the world ended worrying about her daughter, the older of her two children, a few months away at uni and now not quite two weeks dead. Jon really wishes he didn’t know that. He swallows hard and leans into Basira’s hand, just a little. “I'll do that.”

**

Basira isn’t wrong. They need a plan. He means to broach the topic, he really does, but Melanie is standing there with her hand in the fridge, a little giddy at the prospect of electrically powered cold air, and Martin is trying to be surreptitious about the relish with which he turns the lights on and off when he enters and leaves a room, and it’s just—he should feel worse. People are dying while he drags his heels and enjoys the people he—the people he cares about enjoying themselves, just a little, for the first time in months, and even if it’s wrong some part of him wants to stay here, in this moment, and think of no one and nothing outside of this room and the tentative smile on Martin’s lips.

_Plink, plink, plink._

Jon notices first, but by the time that the fourth tap against the window comes the rest of them have caught up. Martin is no longer smiling. Jon looks at Daisy, but she’s not looking back; she’s already half of the way to the window, her eyes sharp and her expression focused. Jon follows her.

There are rocks on the windowsill.

No.

Not rocks.

Bones. Little fragments of bone.

He looks down at the street.

He recognizes the figure he sees standing there, tall but also just _massive_ at a scale that seems not quite right, a handsome cleft chin jutting out from beneath the shadow of a hood and the sides of the sweatshirt moving in a way that would seem off to anyone else and that to Jon suggests more limbs than a person would generally have. He licks his lips, and Jared raises an arm. Another sliver of bone bounces off the window before dropping to the street below.

“I think he wants to talk to me,” he says. His side aches.

He doesn’t realize Basira is standing just behind him until she says, “I’m coming with you.”

He knows ( _Knows_ ) the things which haunt Basira’s sleeping hours, and one of those things is bones and gristle sliding through the grating on a vent, impossible and dreadful and inevitable, Martin gone and Melanie gone and just her, alone, gunmetal cold and futile against the palms of her hands. “You don’t—.”

“Wasn’t actually asking, Jon.”

The wind is up, but Basira is close and warm at his shoulder as he steps onto the street. The wind is howling, but Jon can still hear something else beneath it: wet and meaty, punctuated by the crackle and pop of cartilage realigning.

“Archivist.”

“Hello, Jared.”

The face peering out at him from beneath the hood looks different than it had mere months earlier. That’s probably to be expected. Jon isn’t sure what would have motivated Jared to make these particular modifications – his cheeks and neck are wrinkled and curiously slack, like the skin of an old apple once the flesh inside has withered – but then again, he’s never really understood the motivation behind _any_ of the Boneturner’s modifications.

_“More hands might be useful_ ,” Martin had said once, in the kitchen of Daisy’s safehouse in Scotland and far enough away from all of this for them to occasionally make light of the horror. _“Must have an awful time finding shirts, though. Do you think he cuts extra holes, or—?_ ”

As happy memories go, he supposes that it isn’t much of one. It still makes him feel a little less afraid, standing there in the bitter cold, out of arm’s reach but within the long stretch of Jared’s shadow.

“Heard you were back,” Jared says.

It’s barely been a day. “Where did you hear that?”

Jared shrugs. It’s not a particularly comfortable gesture to watch. It’s not particularly comfortable gesture to _hear_. “Why’d you do it?” Jared asks. There’s an undercurrent of malice to his voice that makes Basira tense and reminds Jon that Jared had never actually stopped wanting him dead. “Why’d you end the world?”

Word travels quickly about all sorts of things, it would seem. “Where did you hear _that_?”

“Didn’t need to hear about it anywhere, now did I? _Knowing_ is a part of your thing, innit? Knowing what’ll scare us, at least. So yeah, I knew when it happened. Think we all did. Maybe. Don’t really talk to the others much. I knew, though. Knew when it happened, knew _what_ happened, and knew who the new big man was.”

Jonah must love that. King of his ruined world, with even the other monsters bowing before him. “Not enjoying the end times, Jared?” he asks, but he asks it soft. There’s not much to pity in Jared Hopworth, but there’s also not much to invite the kind of hate that would inspire gloating, even if Jon were inclined to gloat over this, and even taking into account all that Jared has done. “I imagine not. I doubt there are many things out here cowed by your size, nowadays.”

And Jared—.

Jared shudders.

It’s wet. It’s disgusting. It is, perhaps, a little bit pitiable after all.

“Told you I didn’t want this,” Jared says. “You not listen at all to the statements you go pulling out of people? I _told_ you. I got asked to remake the world once before. Didn’t want it then, don’t want it now. Didn’t think you wanted it, either.”

Jon swallows hard. “I didn’t.”

“Huh.” Jared looks at him. “Don’t s’ppose you can do anything about that.”

It’s not really a question, and it’s not something Jon would feel the need to offer Jared an answer to even if he could, but after a moment Jared grunts as though he has.

“Your skinny friend with the knife around?”

Jon doesn’t think he’s imagining the unease with which Jared asks, and he sees the wisdom when Basira responds, “She’ll be right down. You might want to be gone by then.”

“Might.” He looks hard at Jon for a minute. “I’ve still got your rib.”

“Oh.” What, exactly, is he supposed to do with that? “Are you offering to give it back?”

“No.”

“All right.”

“Mine now. Still don’t like it much. Reckon it might be my good luck charm, though. Or my—what’d you call it? My anchor. Only bone I’m not having to work to keep.”

“...I don’t think that’s how it works,” Jon says, because he _very_ much wants to ask, or know, while being entirely certain he won’t enjoy whatever he learns. He’s trying to get better about that. Not looking for the things he knows will make his life worse, not when he doesn’t have to because doing so means his safety or Martin’s or some other advantage, especially since he so rarely has a say in what terrible things he knows these days.

Jared shrugs again. It’s as awful as it was the first time he did it. “Guess you’d know. Whatever. Be seeing you, Archivist.” He doesn’t wait for Jon’s response. He just turns and starts down the street. His footsteps squelch, and crackle, and squelch again. Jon tries hard not to wince.

There’s something dark on the pavement where Jared had stood. Jon pulls his gaze away from Jared’s departing back to look at it more closely, squinting to see in the glow from the windows behind him and the always-insufficient light cast by the Watcher. His actual vision still isn’t very good. There’s probably some irony in that.

Blood. Something that might be sloughed off skin. Perhaps—perhaps even some viscera, if Melanie had been right and not all of Jared Hopworth’s internal organs are essential to his functioning.

“What are you _doing_?”

Jared must have gone far enough up the street for Basira to no longer feel the need to watch him. “I think—I think I have a plan.”

_Only bone I’m not having to work to keep._

“Why don’t you sound happier about that?”

Jon sighs. “Because I don’t like repeating history. Come on. We should get inside.”

**

“You sent the _Boneturner_?” Oliver considers the implications of that. “Before you sent me? You know, I think I’m insulted.”

“I didn’t send him,” Annabelle says. “I might’ve told him where he could find the Archivist when he asked. Nothing wrong with that. Poor stupid little lamb was hardly going to find the way himself. Why? What’s your problem with him?”

“Repressed state school memories, mostly.”

Annabelle stares at him quizzically for a moment. Oliver doesn’t explain. He doubts that anyone has ever had the temerity to bully Annabelle. Or the ability to walk away after trying it. 

“I’ve always sort of admired his—purity of purpose, I suppose.”

“His purpose is pulling out people’s bones, Annabelle.”

“And he’s very dedicated to it.”

“To _pulling out people’s bones._ ”

“I did hear you the first time.”

“I just think bones should maybe stay on the inside,” Oliver mutters. Annabelle is starting to look a little impatient. “Sorry. Go on.”

**

Daisy is waiting for them in the building’s lobby. That’s not entirely unexpected. Less expected is the second woman waiting with her, eyes wild and hands in a white-knuckled grip around the neck of a table lamp, the power cord dragging on the floor behind her.

“It’s okay, Amanda,” Basira murmurs, as though she _had_ expected this. “We sorted it.” They’re halfway up the stairs before she speaks again. “They were managing on their own for a while before I got here. Georgie’s neighbors, I mean. Guess they got used to being a little, ah, proactive about it all.”

“Anjana is talking about boarding up the windows and installing cameras now that we’ve got some power,” Daisy says, with the placid approval of a woman who has definitely outfitted more than one improvised bunker in her life. Jon isn’t sure what that would actually accomplish, and cameras sound a little too much like something that would appeal to the Eye, but maybe—well, maybe anything that makes people a little less afraid is worth it, at the end of the day, and with their newly lit windows the fear of something out there in the dark unseen, looking in, observing, _waiting_ , seems just as likely to feed Jonah and his god.

Georgie is at the kitchen window when they enter, the one that faces out onto the street. She’s turned the light off, but that’s not fear, just the practical desire to be able to see past her own reflection to the street below. There’s still a pile of tiny bones on the windowsill, probably because Georgie doesn’t find them unnerving enough to risk an open window just to sweep them away. Melanie is sitting at the kitchen table. She has Georgie’s bread knife in front of her. Jon doesn’t doubt that she would have figured out some way to use it, had the need arisen. It seems that the cavalry had well and truly been waiting in the wings, and he almost smiles.

“Martin?”

Georgie jerks her head toward the door to the flat’s second bedroom.

Once, it had been Georgie’s recording studio, and her equipment still dominates one side of the room. Most of it is gathering dust. Her mic stand is in a twisted heap in one corner; he knows without asking that she had used it to beat some creature of the Stranger into a disarticulate heap of plastic and stolen skin not even a week after the world had ended. There’s an inflatable mattress against the opposite wall now, two rolled up sleeping bags on top. It doesn’t look comfortable, but it’s undoubtedly better than wedging themselves back onto the sofa, close and cramped with Jon half draped on top of Martin to fit.

Jon—isn’t doing a particularly good job of fooling himself.

Martin is at the window. Like Georgie, he’s chosen one facing the street. He’s pale in the light bleeding in from the living room. He has his hand cupped against the windowsill, and his expression when he looks at Jon is distinctly caught out.

“Find something?” Jon asks. He’s fairly certain he already knows the answer, and equally certain he’s not going to like it.

“I’m just going to—to take this outside,” Martin says, trying and failing to make it sound casual, as though he’s just decided to take some air in the apocalypse. He drags his cupped hand against the windowsill, until he can trap whatever he’s holding against the palm of his other hand. “Do you mind making up the bed?”

“I don’t.” Jon eyes Martin’s hands warily. He thinks about saying something – escorting a spider out of doors doesn’t exactly seem wise, given their circumstances, the state of the world, and Jared Hopworth at their doorstep uninvited and unprompted – but he hesitates. One tiny house spider is a very _Martin_ thing to care about; it’s half-starved strays in the Archives where they don’t belong and lectures on the ecosystem and his dogged determination to care about things that are unlovely, Jon included. It feels like it’s been a long time since either of them have had the space to care about things like that, or anything that isn’t surviving. Three months is a long time. It’s a long time to just survive, after having a taste of what it’s like to—not do that.

He’s been silent too long, or something of his doubts must show on his face, because Martin sounds a sharp when he says, “Give me this, Jon.”

It’s not the first time one of them has gone prickly and snappish. They’re under a lot of stress. Jon is generally the one to crack first. He doesn’t resent Martin not being at all times agreeable, and it’s hardly Martin’s fault that every time it happens Jon feels a pang of worry that he’s a little bit too unlovely for even Martin to tolerate prolonged and constant exposure under less than ideal circumstances.

“Take Daisy or Basira with you?” For safety. “You’ll need someone to get the door.”

Martin nods jerkily and gives him wide berth as he goes out the door. That, at least, is a clear attempt to keep the spider as far out of Jon’s personal space as possible. By the time Martin returns, Jon has got the sleeping bags spread out across the mattress. Martin flips off the light and swings the door shut, cutting off the quiet murmur of Georgie and Melanie talking in the other room.

The inflatable mattress sags the moment they climb onto it, rolling them toward the center. He can practically hear Martin’s hesitation, and he’s unspeakably grateful when the warm weight of Martin’s arm settles over his waist. They shift in the dark, readjusting until they can fit together comfortably. Jon finds himself resenting the layers of polyester and quilting and flannel a little, but Martin is warm against his back and the palm of his hand is resting on Jon’s chest, and he finds himself not quite missing the couch.

“Sorry.” There’s no reason to whisper, but Jon thinks he understands why Martin does, and that it doesn’t have much to do with habit born from not wanting to draw the attention of anything hunting in the night.

“There’s no need. We’re all—no one’s having an easy go of it.”

Martin breathes in sharp, then lets it out slow.

Martin doesn’t say anything else, but he’s not asleep. Jon isn’t sure how he knows, whether it’s that he’s grown accustomed enough to the sleeping rhythm of Martin’s breathing to be able to tell or whether he’s plucked the information from the heart of a maliciously watching god without meaning to. “Are we going to be all right?”

“We’ll find a way,” Martin says. He makes a faint noise. “Didn’t you hear? Melanie’s on the case now.”

Jon’s fairly certain he hadn’t been asking about the world.

“Think she’s planning to wake us up the same way tomorrow?” he asks, and it’s worth not having an answer to his barely spoken question for the way he can feel Martin’s shake with quickly smothered laughter.

When he steps out of the bathroom in the morning, the sleeping bags have been unzipped and spread out across the mattress, two layers of shared warmth rather than separate pockets.

Maybe that’s answer enough.


	3. Chapter 3

“Do we even know where any of these people are?” Georgie asks. The way her brows are arched speaks of skepticism. The set of her mouth looks like disapproval. She hasn’t dismissed Jon’s plan outright, which is a better outcome than he had expected.

“I do,” he says, at the same time that Basira says, “Yes.”

Melanie and Georgie both look surprised. Daisy doesn’t.

“Basira?” There’s a dangerous note to Melanie’s voice, but it’s a normal sort of danger: a friend deciding whether to be annoyed rather than the wild, barely contained rage Jon remembers from the Institute, and there’s something nice about that. There’s nothing he _should_ find nice or comforting about that, but—well, he’s not exactly spoiled for choice, so he’ll take the little ball of warmth that settles in his stomach when he thinks that he and Basira had saved Melanie, and then Melanie had finished saving herself.

Now they just have to save the world.

The warmth evaporates.

“It’s not all the time,” Basira says, her words clipped and strained. “It’s not—.” She slices a glance in Jon’s direction but doesn’t finish the thought. “It’s whatever. Sometimes I know things. I can follow the clues.”

Daisy reaches out and catches Basira’s elbow, pulls them together until they’re both tilted in Georgie’s kitchen chairs and their shoulders just barely brush, too rough but unmistakably affectionate. “Always were good at that.” She lets Basira go, and there’s the polite silence of several people pretending not to see the flush painted high on Basira’s cheeks. “Mel—Melanie makes a point, though. This is probably the sort of thing we should be sharing if we’re going to be making any kind of plans. No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” Georgie says, firm. Martin murmurs an agreement, but he doesn’t sound convinced. Jon is silent; he can’t help but notice that Melanie is too, her mouth twisted in a thoughtful frown.

He’s fairly certain Daisy’s answering eye roll can be seen from space. “I tried.”

Jon clears his throat. “I can find—most of them, I think.” He can feel the whole world’s fear, and sometimes there’s a source, a quiet little epicenter from which the terror radiates out. “I—some of them are more difficult—the Stranger, the Dark, the Lonely, they’re hard to _see_ , it’s not—but I have a place to start.”

Daisy swings to her feet. “Then let’s start.”

**

Jude Perry does not look pleased to see him.

She’s standing on a rooftop, and the street below her is burning. “Can you feel it?” she asks, once he’s close enough to hear her over the roar of the fire. “The exaltation of my god?” She turns to him and smiles. “Soon this whole city will be rubble.”

“I can feel it,” Jon says. There’s something about her smile, an absence. It has none of the fierce joy of the last time they’d spoken. Her eyes still burn bright, but they look sunken, hollow. There’s sweat beading at her hairline, but—no. It’s not sweat. It’s wax, bubbling and running in the heat rising up over the edge of the roof.

His hand aches, dull and throbbing and persistent.

“I can feel it,” he says again. “Can you?”

Jude’s eyes blaze, and there’s the ferocity that had been missing, but it still feels distant, softer, a banked fire rather than an inferno. “Well enough to burn _you_ , Archivist.” Wax drips down her cheek and gathers in the collar of her shirt, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

Daisy growls, low and rumbling and somehow loud enough to be heard over the flames. Across the street, there’s a roar as one of the buildings collapses in on itself. The night grows a little darker, fire smothered under the bulk of concrete and rebar.

“No more advice?” he asks. His throat feels clogged, choked by smoke and fear, but Daisy is a steady presence behind him and the wind is coming up, feeding the fire but also chilling the sweat on his forehead, his cheeks, the shirt plastered to his back.

“Sure,” Jude says. “Here’s my advice: you should leave. Now. While I’m still giving you the option.”

“Come on, Jon.” Daisy’s hand is on his shoulder. He allows her to lead him away.

**

“The Lukas family—.”

“No.”

Martin looks pale in the uncertain daylight, and it feels a little awful that Jon can’t immediately think of what to say, what convincing excuse to present in support of that resounding _no_ , like silence is a failure.

“Really?” Melanie asks. “We can barely make it across the city, and you think we’re going to make it to—.”

“Kent,” Jon offers quickly.

“Kent,” Melanie says, as though she had never stumbled at all. “There’s got to be someone closer to home.”

“There’s Simon Fairchild.” Jon doesn’t realize he knows where to find Fairchild until he’s saying it, and at this Martin nods.

“I’ll go,” Martin says.

**

Basira insists on coming with him. Martin doesn’t fight it, because he’s not stupid. He knows he has slim odds of making it through the outside world unscathed without someone there to—to hold his hand, but no, that’s not right. Someone there to guard his back. If Basira hadn’t volunteered, Jon would have insisted, and after months away from anything that looks even the littlest bit like safety it’s _nice_ to know sleeping or letting his attention wander or stepping away from Jon won’t be an invitation for the dark or the fog or whatever other horror is currently lurking closest to come creeping in. He’s grateful. He can make himself feel grateful.

The National Gallery looks much as it always has, which is weirder than anything else they’ve passed by or seen on the way here. The rest of London is marked by what has happened, _consumed_ by it, but the museum looms over Trafalgar Square like the last remaining monument to the world that was. Or maybe not a monument; maybe a mausoleum. It’s empty, so empty that when Martin steps inside he has to take a moment to convince himself that his aren’t the only footsteps he can hear, that Basira is right behind him.

“I think I know why he’s here,” Martin says. He speaks in a hushed voice, even though it’s silly to worry about disturbing the silence. “I don’t know where—.”

“I can find him,” Basira says. “Come on.”

Martin follows. There are a few blank spaces on the walls in the rooms they pass through; looters, maybe, or maybe museum staff trying to save what they could before they had realized that they couldn’t even save themselves. Most of the art is still here, though, and the inside seems as undamaged as the outside. Probably no one had thought that a single building and its contents were worth tangling with Simon Fairchild. He doubts that any of the other things lurking or hunting outside the Gallery had been overcome by a sudden passion for art preservation.

He’d never had much of a chance to come here, before. There had been his mum, and his job at the Archives, and—well, it hadn’t seemed worth it to come alone. It seems like the kind of place he might’ve liked, once, maybe somewhere he would’ve idly daydreamed about taking Jon. Coffee, a walk, and then wandering through the Gallery, listening to Jon talk about the artwork, pretending to understand it the way that the person who had actually earned the credentials on Martin’s CV might’ve. The thought seems a very far way away, now.

“Are you okay?” Basira asks. She’s speaking softly too, so at least it isn’t just him. “You’re—quiet.”

Martin casts her a disbelieving look. “We’re sneaking up on an Avatar of the Vast.”

“I didn’t just mean right now.”

He stops, but Basira doesn’t, so he forces his feet back into motion. “Maybe I just don’t have much to say.” He laughs. It sounds high and nervous in his own ears, and he _hates_ it. “The world ended, Basira. Not the best time to small talk.”

“Yeah,” she says, and Martin breathes a sigh of relief before she adds, “but you used to. To me. And things weren’t exactly great then, either. Remember?”

He does. He had. He remembers standing in a phone box in Scotland, making inconsequential noises that might’ve been words at Basira until the heat of his breath had condensed on the glass and his elbows had cramped from holding them too tight to his body. He doesn’t know how to tell her that the reminder makes him feel worse.

“You got me through those weeks while Daisy was missing, you know that?” Basira says, like the silence hasn’t stretched long enough for the absence of his response to become painfully obvious. “Not—not the first time.” It’s kind of her not to actually say _why_ Martin hadn’t been any help the first time Daisy had gone missing: too twisted up by Jon and his mum, and then too involved with Peter Lukas. “But after the attack on the Institute. Talking to you, it made me less—.”

_Alone_. She doesn’t say it, but they both hear the word all the same.

“I didn’t,” he says. “Know, I mean.” He hadn’t. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. He feels guilty about that now, for not realizing that while he was finding his feet and learning Jon in Scotland, she had been stuck here, enough on her own that it had helped to have him rambling at her over the phone while he tried to remember the sound of his own voice and the call-and-response of conversation with another person.

“Martin,” she says, and he can hear her hesitation. “Do you feel lonely?”

No, not _lonely_. Lonely.

“No,” he says sharply. Basira glances over her shoulder at him, a frown on her lips, and he forces himself to sound gentler on the refrain. “No, it’s—it’s not that. Okay? I promise it’s not that.”

“All right,” Basira says, but not like she’s entirely sure she believes him. Her eyes are large and dark and a little too knowing in a way that reminds him of Jon, and for a moment he can sort of understand why Daisy Tonner had loved her. Not the Daisy who had come out of the coffin, but the one who had gone in, the one who hadn’t really seemed built in such a way that she should be able to love anything. “You should think about talking to someone, though, if you’re not going to talk to me.”

His mouth feels dry. He’s not sure what to say to that, and in the end it doesn’t matter: they’ve reached the gallery they’ve been looking for.

The room is long, with high vaulted ceilings and muted green walls. It feels big, big the same way that the rest of the Gallery does, maybe not _vast_ exactly but grand in a way that makes Martin feel small and inconsequential. No wonder Simon likes it here.

Simon is standing about midway down the room. He has to have noticed them enter, but his gaze doesn’t stray from the painting in front of him.

“Martin, my boy,” he says, once Martin and Basira have drawn closer. Basira is so tense her shoulders are approaching her ears, but Martin feels the most relaxed he’s been anywhere but Georgie and Melanie’s flat in months. The devil he knows, he supposes. “Come take a gander. I painted this one, you know. Well, parts of it.”

He beckons Martin closer.

At a guess, it’s Saint George and the Dragon. The fleeing princess near the bottom of the canvas is wearing an expression of undiluted terror. Martin’s stomach squirms, and he glances away from her quickly, toward what he’s certain Simon actually wants him to be looking at: the top half of the painting, a calm stretch of sea reaching out into the distance until it touches the roiling blue-gold of the heavens. Tintoretto had probably meant for the princess to be running from the dragon, but the way the painting is composed, it’s possible for Martin to imagine that all of her fear is for that wide open sky.

“Can you believe it?” Simon asks. He raises a hand, and he’s too short to reach, but Martin can tell what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s trying to cover up the divine figure dominating the top center of the painting, golden and glowing and looking beneficently down on the slaughter and the terror below. “The unmitigated gall. Blotting out my sky with his _god_.”

Martin clears his throat, awkward and jarring and probably far too revealing.

Simon finally looks at him and laughs. “Don’t look so alarmed. I’m not angry with your Archivist. I don’t suppose he could help it. He was just—hmm. Listening to his own music, yes? Not like that hack.” He jerks his head toward the painting.

He sounds as jovial as he had at the Institute, but he’s changed. He had been short and pink and thin, but it’s more pronounced now, skin stretched so tight over his skull that Martin thinks he can see the shape of Simon’s teeth through his lips. There had been a vitality to him before that had made him seem larger than life, but now he just seems—diminished.

“I doubt you came for a social call,” Simon says. “Unless you’ve decided to take me up on the roller coaster? If so, no time like the present! I’m sure you’ve noticed; the world is ending.”

“No,” Martin says. “But yes, it’s about that. The world. I thought you might—know something.”

“Ah,” Simon says. “So it’s to be questions again. Well, that’s disappointing, but I won’t pretend I’m surprised.” He waves a hand. “Go ahead. Ask. Try to make it interesting.”

Martin looks at Basira. There’s really only one question. In the end, she’s the one who asks it. “You know anything that might help?”

Simon’s attention shifts to Basira. “Oh. How delightful. First Martin, and now you. I’ll never understand it. Elias—Jonah, I suppose you know that much now—well, he’s such a dull boy. I’ll never understand how he picks out such charming specimens. Must be his patron. All that _seeing_ and _knowing_. Not much _being_ seen these days, if we’re talking about Jonah, but I suppose that’s the nature of the position he’s put himself in.”

“Just answer the question.”

A soft chuckle trickles out of Simon’s thin lips. “ _Delightful_. For you, my dear, I think I will.”

Basira shoots Martin a look. He interprets the look as _is the creepy old man flirting with me_?

_Probably_ , says his answering shrug.

“I’m not sure what it is you think I might know,” Simon says musingly. “Maybe in the world before this one, but it can’t have escaped your notice that I’m not exactly what I once was.” He sighs, but it’s more careless than sorrowing. “The Falling Titan is _here_ now. What use does it have for me? I spent my years feeding it crumbs, and when that was all it had to eat, my devotion was enough for it to feed me in return. Now it has a banquet, and I’m—I suppose I’m rather superfluous.” He gives a dramatic little shiver. The smile remains firmly in place on his lips. “I feel very insignificant these days. Very small in the grand scheme of things. Isn’t that lovely? One final gift from my patron before The End of All Things finally claims from me his long-delayed due, perhaps.”

“That doesn’t bother you?” Basira asks, before Martin has even formulated the need for a response.

“Why would it?” He looks at Martin. “I told you, didn’t I? I’m not completely impotent, of course. I might yet survive. Or I won’t, and that will be fine, too.”

“You said that about the Extinction.”

“Is there a difference between the two?” Simon is still smiling. Martin wishes he would stop. “I mean, functionally?”

“Maybe not,” Martin says, soft.

Simon turns back to the painting. He studies it for a long moment before he reaches out, fingers so thin that they look sharp hovering over that roiling sky. “Still,” he says, and he sounds almost wistful, “I do wish I could hear that symphony, just one more time.”

**

“What about the Institute? Elias?”

“Elias? _Really_? When has talking to Elias ever helped with anything?”

“I wasn’t suggesting that we talk to him,” Daisy says, and there’s something fierce and bloody in her voice and the accompanying smile, something that Jon isn’t sure he should encourage. Melanie doesn’t seem to feel the same reluctance. She holds her hand up and, after a moment of staring at her blankly, Daisy gives her a high five.

“No,” Jon says, and he pretends it’s a rational objection and that he can’t feel his own reluctance curdling in his stomach.

Martin reaches across the kitchen table that has become their go-to meeting place until he can touch Jon’s wrist. The turn of his mouth is soft, sympathetic, and Jon tries not to feel shamed by that. “Not yet,” Jon says. “You’re right that we’ll have to deal with Elias eventually, but I’m not eager to make things—worse, somehow, by going in unprepared.”

“There’s a worse?” Georgie asks. No one seems to have an answer for that.

**

This fear feels like wet soil on the back of his tongue, clogging and choking, and he doesn’t expect to recognize a face. He does: high cheekbones and large eyes, plump arms and little bird bones that look like they’d be easily crushed by the weight of the earth.

“Mister—Sims? It was _Sims_ , wasn’t it? I’m sorry, it’s been so long.”

“Hello,” Jon says, to cover for the fact that he doesn’t exactly remember a name to go with the face, except as soon as he thinks the thought he _does_ remember. “Karolina. It’s,” he reaches for the lie, but it comes out awkward all the same, “good to see you.”

“You’ve seen me before this,” she says, with a funny little smile. “In my dreams.” She frowns, seems to realize how that sounds “I don’t—I don’t mean—.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You look different there. All eyes. Kind of spooky, if I’m being honest? Haven’t had one of those dreams for a while, though.”

There’s a block of flats in front of them. It’s sinking slowly into the damp earth, clay and weeds catching against the brickwork walls before being dragged down. The ground floor windows are half disappeared when the screaming starts to echo against the insides of Jon’s skull, and that’s when Jon realizes that the building isn’t one of the many empty ones lining London’s streets, that there are people inside.

“Wait,” he gasps. Karolina Górka flicks a glance in his direction, but the slow descent of the building doesn’t halt. He reaches out to grab her arm. Her round cheeks are ghostly pale and damp, like something that’s lived too long underground. “Stop. _Stop_.”

She shakes him off, but the building stops sinking into the dirt. She stares at him for a long moment with huge, fathomless eyes. “Fine. Suit yourself, Archivist.” The palm of his hand is black, filthy, even though the arm of her coat where he had touched her looks pristine. “That’s what they call you now, isn’t it? Archivist.”

Someone is already hurtling themself against the door, trying to get it to budge. It doesn’t work, but a few minutes later one of the windows, half consumed by the hungry earth, shatters. The glass glitters strangely in the glow of the Eye.

Karolina has nothing useful to tell him. She leaves before he does, and he tries to make it feel like a victory, a few souls almost lost with their fingers digging grooves in the cold and the muck as they pull themselves over jagged glass and broken soil to safety.

**

“Helen—.”

Melanie snorts. “Helen will come by eventually. When she wants to.”

**

Jon dreams of drowning. He’s close enough to see the surface, but not close enough to reach it. He holds his breath for as long as he can. His lungs don’t burn with the need for oxygen, but eventually he opens his mouth anyway. The water rushes in, but he doesn’t choke on it. Instead he’s filled. Sated.

He wakes to someone banging on the bedroom door, and he can almost pretend that his heart is thundering in his chest because he’s startled by the noise and not because every time he sleeps – if it’s sleep – he wakes the same way, unable to breathe around the fear and drenched in what he rationally knows is a cold sweat and not evidence of some kind of physical, literal truth to his dreams.

“I don’t like to complain about the hospitality,” Martin mumbles into his shoulder, “but I wish they’d find another way to wake us.”

Georgie looks no happier to be knocking on the door than Jon is to have her doing it. “There was a second closet door in our room when we woke up today,” she says. “Melanie asked me to get you.”

“Oh,” Jon says, before his half-waking brain catches up with what Georgie is saying. “ _Oh_. I—yes. I’ll be right with you.”

Melanie is just buttoning a pair of jeans under an oversized _What the Ghost?_ t-shirt. Jon averts his gaze. She takes her cane when Georgie hands it to her, but she doesn’t unfold it.

“Aren’t you going to—?”

“No point,” Melanie says with a shrug. “Helen will make sure I don’t get lost.”

“Is that wise?”

Melanie’s lips curve into a smile. “Don’t judge my friends, Jon. I might start judging yours, and—.”

She stops. Frowns. Snaps her fingers. He can _feel_ the punchline approaching at speed, but he’s helpless to stop it. “Oh. Wait.”

“Ha. Ha.” He’s not smiling. He’s not.

“Do you get it? Because you don’t have any friends?”

“Except you.” He tries for sarcastic, but it comes out quiet and mortifyingly sincere. “Feel free to judge.”

Melanie turns her head, and he thinks she might be attempting to hide the way her smile has gone wider and softer. “Fine. You got me. You win. I’m flawless. You have phenomenal taste in friends.”

A soft laugh rolls through the room, curling up the walls and twisting around Jon’s stomach until all he can feel is a cold, hard knot. The second closet door is open, and it’s yellow now; he’s certain it hadn’t been yellow before. Helen is standing there, bordered by the doorframe and the fragmented light spilling out from behind her. “Oh,” she says. “Are we talking in circles, now? I like that.”

Jon doesn’t know what to say, but Melanie is still smiling. “You would.”

Martin is standing in the bedroom door now, still sleep-rumbled, his gaze locked on the yellow door. Georgie is frowning, but she’s not looking at the door or at Helen. She’s looking at him, and she’s looking at Melanie, and for a moment he’s inclined to read her expression as the same disapproval she’s worn every time she’s looked at him since he turned up on her doorstep after the end of the world, but instead he just ends up thinking that she looks tired and maybe a little sad.

“Jon,” Martin says, voice tight and strained. “Are you sure about this?”

“Sure he’s sure,” Melanie says. She holds a hand out to him, steady and imperious. “Come on.”

He—trusts her. He decides to trust her. “It’ll be fine.” Melanie’s palm is dry. From the way her nose wrinkles briefly with disgust, the same can’t be said about his.

He’d often not liked Melanie, but he’d always thought she was brave. Misguided, maybe, perhaps even foolish, but fearless in a way that even Georgie isn't, because unlike Georgie she’s had to work for it. It’s good to look at her and see that again. It steadies him, makes him feel like perhaps there’s nothing to be afraid of after all.

There is, of course. But it’s a nice feeling, borrowing some of her courage.

“Will you walk into my parlour, Archivist?” Helen asks. She tilts her head. The angle is wrong, disturbing, neck stretching until her cheek is a perfect parallel to her shoulder. “Wait. That’s wrong, isn’t it? That's not mine.”

“The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,” Martin murmurs. He sounds stilted, as though the words are being dragged out of him. Helen smiles at him over Jon’s shoulder. It’s unsettling to see.

“Yes,” she says, “that’s right. And it’s all the same now, isn’t it?” She returns her attention to Jon. “Well?”

He adjusts his grip on Melanie’s hand, and he takes a deep breath.

He steps through the door.

**

Annabelle stops, and turns until she can signal the server for another beer she hasn’t ordered or paid for. She doesn’t start speaking again, apparently waiting for her drink to arrive.

“Did you just,” Oliver says, disbelieving, “leave me on a cliffhanger?”

“I like the anticipation,” she says, with a sharp little smile. “Don’t you?”

“No,” Oliver says, although he smiles back. “I like an end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's [that Tintoretto painting](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-tintoretto-saint-george-and-the-dragon)!


	4. Chapter 4

Nothing here looks like he remembers it. There had been corridors then, bright walls and impossible nightmare mirrors, but now his eyes dazzle and ache. All he can see is light and noise – he can _see_ the noise, and the inside of his skull throbs distantly as he tries to make sense of that. He thinks that he might vomit, and then he wonders what that even means, what it’s like to want to vomit, if he can trust either the memory of the feeling or the impulse. He hurts, every part that feels like him hurts, like pressure bearing down directly on his brain—.

He tries to _see_ , past the noise, past the light.

“ _Stop that_ ,” Helen says, cross. “No need to be _rude_ , Archivist. It was an honest mistake. I’m used to playing hostess to Melanie, and she’s outgrown the petty constraints of sight.”

“Not exactly how I’d put it, but thanks,” Melanie says. Her voice is bone dry, and her hand is still equally dry where it presses against his. He clings to that, the feeling of skin against skin, until the weight and the heat and the confusion and the hundreds of other words that convey sensation and don’t even come close to conveying experience settle down, and he feels like he can trust his own senses again.

“I think I might be sick,” Jon confides.

“Not on me, please,” Melanie says immediately, but she gives his hand a little squeeze and doesn’t immediately step away. Jon feels a bit sentimental.

“That,” Helen says, slow and very thoughtful, “is disgusting. Having a body is disgusting. I really don’t know how you tolerate it.”

Jon’s thankfully empty stomach heaves. He closes his eyes.

“I don’t think you’re helping, Helen.”

“Fine,” Helen says, all wounded dignity. “I’ll just be silent then, shall I?”

Jon focuses on his breathing (he’s not sure he needs to breathe). He focuses on the queasy churning of his guts (he’s not certain what he even has inside him that he could vomit up; maybe it would be words, statements, the smear of someone else’s fear leaving a stain on a carpet that hadn’t even existed minutes earlier). When he’s recovered, Melanie has just about finished explaining, and perhaps that had been the best approach to begin with, because Helen actually appears to be listening attentively, head tilted at a quizzical, impossible angle.

“—and none of the other monst—the people who were working with one power or another seem to be doing too well, which, can’t say that I don’t sort of think they all have it coming. No offense, obviously. And not you, Helen. Are you—not doing so well?”

Jon considers the wisdom of reminding her that Helen _might_ also have it coming, but the words coming out of Melanie’s mouth and the way she says them stop up any that he might speak. She sounds so warm and so careless, the way she does when speaking to Georgie or the Admiral, and he remembers that she had called Helen a friend.

She probably knows what Helen is, what she’s done, but she—she knows what he’s done, too, and she’d also called him her friend. They all know what Daisy once was, what she could be again. Melanie had drawn the firmest line in the proverbial sand out of any of them, had called doing the work of the Archives evil and then had done all that she could to _not_ have to do it. He doesn’t understand how she can look at Helen and what Helen has become and consider that something worth knowing, but perhaps he doesn’t need to understand—everything.

Maybe Basira had been right, and none of them can be forgiven, but all of them can decide how much they’re willing to tolerate and what’s still human enough to be loved. Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing, for Melanie to have decided differently than he would have.

“Are you _concerned_ about me?”

Helen—The Distortion—Helen sounds amused, but he doesn’t think he’s imagining that she sounds a little fond as well.

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Not really, no. The others you refer to, they were all very human once. They still are, in many of the ways that matter, although try to convince them of that. This world is no longer meant to accommodate anything human, and I suppose they’re all having some trouble adjusting.” There’s something cruel in the way her smile twists.

“You were human too, weren’t you?” Melanie asks. “Before Helen became, uh.”

“Helen became me,” Helen says, “but I also became her. It’s not the same thing. Does that answer your question?”

“Not even a little bit.” Melanie’s lips quirk. “Used to that, though.”

Helen turns to look at him with dizzying eyes. “And you? I’m certain you have questions. You always do. Will you wrench answers from my unwilling throat, Archivist?”

He should. He knows he should.

Melanie had called her a friend. Melanie had called _him_ a friend. He can’t let that matter more than the world, but it does matter. “Do you have any?”

“Perhaps. Do you know what questions you should be asking?” She’s smiling at him. She’s taunting him, and she doesn’t care that he knows it.

He clears his throat. “You said that if I asked, only one of us would survive.”

“That was then,” Helen says, flicking her sharp fingers dismissively, “and this is now.” She shrugs elaborately, and not in a figurative sort of way, shoulders splitting briefly at the seams and arms long and bending in a way that suggests that skeletal structure is no longer an immutable reality when it comes to Helen. “Things have changed, haven’t they? This world is very accommodating to _me_ , but it is rather—well, boring, don’t you think?”

“Not really.”

“And perhaps,” she says, slow and thoughtful, with a glance at Melanie that he doesn’t miss, “I am also a bit—concerned.”

“Are you saying that you’re—that you’ll—it can’t be that easy.”

Helen’s smile widens. Watching it feels like a trap closing. “Ask, and find out.”

Jon swallows. “How can I fix this?”

“Disappointing,” Helen says, and she actually does seem disappointed. “I know things, but I’m not _omniscient_ , Archivist. Try harder next time.” She lifts a hand, and when he tracks the movement with his eyes he sees that the door has reappeared, no longer at the end of the hall but to one side of where he and Melanie are standing, in the place of what had been a mirror moments earlier. “You can show yourselves out.”

Frustration bubbles up in his chest. “Just the same old games, Helen?”

“Jon—.”

Whatever rebuke or warning Melanie has to offer him, Helen beats her to it. She’s suddenly further into his space than he remembers her being, looming and twisting over him, the suggestion of a woman he had once known, had once tried to help, but without the substance. “I told you once before. Chaos is coming. Chaos has _come_. I might help. I might even want to help. But I can’t give you what you _don’t know how to ask for_.” She studies him a moment. “It’s almost funny, really. You know so much, and you understand so little. Go home, now. Come back when you’re ready. If you need help—hmm. If you need help, send Melanie. I actually like her. I’ll do what I can, when I can, if she’s the one asking. If I see the opportunity, I _might_ do more.”

She’s very close. She’s very _sharp_. “And that’s all? That’s it?”

“You say that like it’s nothing I’ve offered you.”

“Fine,” Jon replies, “I’ve thought of another question.” Helen doesn’t say _no_ , and when Jon asks, “How long has it been since your last meal? Since the last time you lured someone like Marcus McKenzie through your door and trapped them here?” he knows it isn’t the Beholding or even a more natural curiosity that makes him ask. It’s just spite. It’s just—.

He thinks he might miss Helen Richardson, a little. He doesn’t see what Melanie sees in the Distortion, _this_ Distortion, the one who looks a bit like Helen but isn’t her. Or maybe it’s not even Helen he misses; maybe he just selfishly misses being able to hear her offer to help and perhaps not trusting the words, but _wanting_ to.

“Oh, Archivist,” Helen says, and laughs. “Not for weeks.”

“That’s a lie.” It’s almost a relief. Anything that feels like certainty here is a relief.

“It _could_ be. But it isn’t. I thought Melanie might not like it, if we were to be—friends.”

“Christ,” Melanie breathes. She clears her throat. “Yeah—yeah. That’s, uh, that was a good call, Helen. I wouldn’t have liked it.”

Helen looks pleased. “You see, Archivist? I really am here to help. To be a _friend_. Isn’t that lovely?”

A tiny hiccup of disbelieving laughter comes out of Jon’s mouth without him meaning for it to. There’s a lump of something wild and giddy lodged in his throat, something which might accurately be called _hysteria_ if Jon were even remotely willing to apply the word to himself. “You hardly look like you’re starving.”

“Does your left hand wither and starve if you only feed yourself with your right?” Helen asks.

_The whole world is afraid_ , Jon thinks, and as soon as he thinks it he knows, _knows_ that Helen is telling the truth. She hasn’t taken a victim in weeks. She hasn’t needed to. The Spiral, the Twisting Deceit, the Throat of Delusion, whatever he wishes to call it, it’s here now, and it’s well-sated. The Distortion has always been a part of that, even if it’s a part that never quite had the chance to _become_ after getting all tangled up with Michael Shelly and then with Helen Richardson. A hand won’t starve as long as the belly is full.

"Being a little less human than the other monsters does have its advantages, as I said.” A pause. “Tell me, how long has it been since you were hungry?”

Months.

Jon takes a step back. He bumps up against Melanie, and she wraps a hand around his arm. He doesn’t know if she’s offering him support or restraint, but either way, he’s grateful for it. “Come on, Jon,” she says. “We should go.”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. All right.”

“Bye, Helen.”

“Goodbye, Melanie.”

Logically, he knows that he’s the one who guides Melanie through the door, her cane still folded in the hand not gripping his arm, but it very much feels like she’s the one leading him. They emerge into the bedroom. It’s empty and silent now. Idly, Jon wonders how much time has passed.

They should go. They should find Martin and Georgie, tell the others what little Helen had been willing – or able – to share. Neither of them make any move to do so, and Melanie is still holding on to his arm.

“Hey,” she says. “Can I ask you something?”

There’s a frown on her lips, and her face is screwed up in a look of intense concentration. He expects her to ask about what Helen had said, about the hunger, and he’s dreading having to give an answer, but she just says, “Have you tried to—to _know_ anything about me, since you got here?”

“Melanie—I—of course not, I—.” He tries to think if he’s discovered anything about her without meaning to. “I wouldn’t, not _intentionally_ at least, I know you don’t—.”

“Can you? Can you—try? Please.”

Jon stops.

“You’re sure?” he asks, cautious.

“Wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t. It’s—there’s something that Helen told me. Not now, weeks ago, but—.” Melanie lets out a breath, slow and unsteady. “Please,” she says again. “It’s important. To me.”

Jon closes his eyes.

It’s easier than it once was. That’s not a _good_ thing, although it has occasionally been a useful one. The door is open. He can feel the fear, the whole world’s fear. He _knows_ that fear, and he can know more, if he tries, when he tries, like sliding his hands through the floodwaters and looking for the glitter of gold beneath. He does that now, focuses on Melanie and tries to know, to see, and finds—.

“Nothing,” he says.

Melanie is standing right there next to him; her hand is on his arm. Melanie is a hole in the fabric of the universe, a cut-out shaped like a person, a mystery, a question mark, unknown and unknowable. It doesn’t even feel like searching for a creature of the Stranger, or one of the cultists who had once served the Dark. Nothing is keeping him from seeing her, nothing is obscuring his vision. It’s like she isn’t even there to _be_ seen.

He opens his eyes.

“Good,” Melanie says, voice thick with satisfaction. “That’s good.”

**

Most nights, Jon dreams of drowning. That night he dreams of ants swarming across his skin. His eyes are open. He can’t close them, and he can see those crawling, seeking legs, those pinching mouth parts, can feel them scraping wet along his eyelids until that scratching, teaming mass covers his vision and blots out the world. All he can see is the black, roiling mass of them. He wants to scream. He doesn’t. He doesn’t scream for as long as he can, and then he opens his mouth and they pour into him. He can feel them pressing against his tongue, the back of his throat, still moving even as they crawl down deep inside of him. They make him choke, and gag. They sing to him of love.

He wakes.

Martin grumbles out a protest as Jon untangles their arms and their legs. He presses his mouth against Martin’s forehead, right above his left eyebrow, and for a moment his chest aches and sings to him of love.

He leaves their improvised bed, Martin’s warmth and the cold of the plastic mattress bleeding through Georgie’s well-worn sheets. He leaves the room, bare feet brushing against the carpet.

“Jon?”

Georgie is in the kitchen, her robe hanging low around her shoulders and a glass of water cradled between her palms. She sounds alarmed. He wishes that he could reassure her.

He pushes open the front door to the flat. They’ve kept the hallways lit since they got the generator up and running. It might not be wise, but it is comforting. His feet are clumsy on the stairs, but he curls his toes against the edge of the steps and clutches the banister and manages to not go crashing down to the landing.

_“Jon.”_

He staggers to a stop in front of another door. The hallway here is dark. It shouldn’t be. In the faint glow bleeding in from the building’s lobby, he can see something black smeared across the carpet by the door. “Do you have your phone?”

She’s kept it charged since the power came on. No one calls, but hope springs eternal. It’s not something Georgie has ever told him. It’s not the kind of thing they tell each other, not any more. Jon still knows, and mostly just wishes that he didn’t.

“I—yes.”

He doesn’t have to tell her what he needs; the cool glow of her phone’s torch fills the hall. Black on the carpet. Black creeping up the door from the bottom. He knows what he’s looking at now. No one lives any amount of time in London without being able to recognize the soft, powdery bloom of black mold across a wall. “Who lives here?”

“Cameron. Jon, what are you—.”

The doorknob is cool beneath the palm of his hand. Cameron. He recognizes the name. He remembers that there had been mold on the day old bread that Georgie’s neighbor had baked for her.

“Jon, _wait_.”

He doesn’t.

The glow from Georgie’s phone isn’t strong enough to penetrate far into the flat’s gloom, but it’s enough. He can barely see the white of the walls through the mold, dusty black here, thick and white there, brown and softly fuzzed near the door leading into the kitchen and slick green on the window glass, blotting out whatever light might seep through from outside. The smell is intense, musty.

There’s a man on the sofa in the front room, slumped down against the cushions with his long legs flopped out on the floor in front of him. He’s very still, but Jon doesn’t need to check his pulse or watch for the rise and fall of his chest to know that he’s alive, and that he’s afraid.

“Christ,” Georgie breathes behind him. “Just—stay where you are.” She sounds firm. There’s no fear in her, and no give. “I’ll get—.” She doesn’t finish her sentence. She goes. She takes her phone with her, but it doesn’t matter. Jon has seen what’s waiting for him deeper into the flat. He can see it still, even with the light source gone. That doesn’t immediately strike him as strange.

It sings to him of love. It sings to him of the yeast that makes his bread rise and the rippling veins in the Jersey Blue cheese he buys on his way home from work when he’s feeling extravagant, the dry-cured salami he’d sliced up and served to Leisel the first time he had convinced her to come back to his flat after a date, the dark and rich flavor of a beer spilling across his tongue and his teeth at the end of a long day, the salty savor of the Marmite his mother had spread on toast for him as a child. It sings to him of full bellies and how well it’s fed him, fed the people he loves, sings to him of _home, home, love, home_ , the one he’s built, the one they’ll build together.

The memories aren’t Jon’s, and the song isn’t for him. He steps further into the flat.

The man—Cameron—doesn’t react. Closer now, Jon can see that the mold is heavier on his clothes, but that even his skin has turned a mottled green, teaming with new, invasive life. It’s thickest around his lips, and Jon _knows_ that it’s thriving best there, in the dark wet places of its new host’s body, knows that the mold doesn’t stop at Cameron’s mouth, has crawled deeper, seeking warmth and safety and _home_. He’s suddenly aware of the sickened fear curling in his own stomach, but that—that isn’t useful, it won’t _help_ , and he—.

He wants to help. _Needs_ to help, needs to be able to do something other than sit idly by and _watch_ while someone else is made a meal of.

He reaches out, brushing the mold from Cameron’s eyes. It’s dense enough to have sealed the lids shut but surprisingly dry and soft to touch, and it begins to creep over Jon’s fingers the moment he touches it, curling along and under the edges of his nails and up over the first knuckle. He ignores the queasy churn of his stomach and the way his hands start to shake. He continues to work. Eventually he’s able to use his thumbs to slide Cameron’s eyes open. The blue of the man’s irises are edged with irregular black; the contamination has spread even here. It loves best the dark, wet places of its new host’s body. Jon shudders, but he doesn’t look away.

_I see now why the hive hates you._

The voice sounds like Jane Prentiss in his head, even though he had barely heard her speak and had not been the one to take her statement when she had come to the Archives the first time, looking for—help, a way out, a witness, whatever it was that had driven her to enter the Magnus Institute and write down the words past the buzzing song inside of her. He hadn’t taken her statement, but he remembers it now perfectly, clearly, better than he had even in the hours and days immediately after he had first read it. The words. The way she had felt writing them. _The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid._ He remembers—.

_You can see it and log it and note its every detail but you can never understand it._

Jon _looks_. That’s all he does. Some days, it feels as though that’s all he’s ever done. In the end, it’s all he _needs_ to do.

_You rob it of its fear._

The slow creep of the mold over his own skin stops, then drops away all at once, like dust being shaken off of a curtain. The black muddling Cameron’s eyes dissipates next. Jon knows that his throat must be clear when the whimpering starts.

He’s not sure how long he stands there, listening to the small choked off fear noises Georgie’s neighbor can’t seem to stop making. He watches. He waits. When Cameron finally moves it’s all at once, prone one moment and shoving frantically off the couch and past Jon the next. Jon staggers but doesn’t fall, and Cameron doesn’t go far: he curls into a ball on the ground, retching and sobbing helplessly against the carpet.

“Thanks, Jane,” Jon murmurs, and immediately feels foolish for it. His eyes burn and his knees feel weak, although that could just be from standing with eyes open staring wide and knees locked for too long in the same position.

“Jon?”

Georgie is in the doorway. Martin and Basira are wedged behind her. They look like they’ve raided the cleaning supply closet, all of them in rubber gloves up to the elbows and Martin with a slightly crumpled disposable painter’s mask strapped over his face. Georgie is wielding a spray bottle like it’s a weapon. Martin is leaning slightly into the weight of the bucket he’s carrying, and even from here Jon can smell the chemical burn of bleach.

For a moment, they all just stand there. Georgie is the first to move, perhaps because the other two can’t enter past her, or perhaps because Georgie is unafraid and very, very good at calculating the risks: the walls and windows are clear now, no more covered in filth than they would have been after a week or two of neglect.

She doesn’t check on Jon. She barely looks at him. Instead she goes to her knees next to her neighbor, the hand not holding the bottle of Dettol resting on his shoulder to steady him as he dry heaves. Her mouth looks pinched, unhappy.

He—shouldn’t feel resentful. He knows he shouldn’t. Cameron undoubtedly needs the help, and if Georgie isn’t pleased with Jon, well, she often isn’t these days. It’s childish to want to say, _I helped, I fixed it, I did something right for once, how can you be mad at me for that?_

“Huh,” Basira says, carefully, as though she’s determined to have no reaction stronger than that one. She catches Jon’s eye and jerks her head toward the door. “You and Martin go. Georgie and me, we can take it from here.” She looks around the flat, and he can’t shake the idea that she’s seeing more than what’s there, that she has some glimmer of what _was_ there. She sighs, and Jon bites back something sharp and tries not to feel like—like he’s some misbehaving child that they’ve decided unanimously to send off to bed.

He holds his spine stiff and straight as he walks toward the door. Basira catches his shoulder before he can step past her. “Weird,” she says, “and we’re going to need to talk about this. But—you know. Well done.” She’s looking at him out of the corner of her eye. She sees too much, these days, although he’s hardly one to comment or to judge. Her grip on his shoulder tightens briefly before she lets him go. “It’s the middle of the night, Jon, and you’ve done enough. Get some rest.”

Some of the offended air comes rushing out of his lungs and he forces his shoulders to relax. “Yes, I—fine. Thank you. I will.”

Basira makes a faint, dubious noise and Martin takes Jon’s arm. He sets down the bucket he’s been holding; it hits the ground hard, and some of the bleach inside sloshes over the edge. The smell is pungent, strong, and the weeping from inside the flat has become louder, and Jon is no longer quite so sorry to allow himself to be guided away.

He’s tired, suddenly and completely exhausted, his feet even clumsier going up the stairs than they had been going down, even with Martin standing on the step behind him and steadying him with rubber gloved hands against his shoulders. He’s still not sure he needs to sleep, but he’s tired; there’s something a little unfair about that. Martin has the sleepy-eyed, startled, rumpled look of a man dragged too hastily from slumber by an emergency. They’re neither of them at their best, and perhaps that’s why neither of them notice before stepping through that the door to Georgie and Melanie’s shared flat has changed in color.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> added to the projected chapter count because I apparently can't write a Helen scene without it being half a chapter long and throwing off my outline something awful, which honestly seems pretty on brand for both of us.


	5. Chapter 5

Jon’s eyes are half shut as he steps through the door, so his first warning that anything is wrong is the way the air turns cold and damp against his cheeks. It’s not warning enough; by the time he’s realized there’s cause for concern, the door is clicking closed on Martin’s heels.

The cemetery stretches out in all directions, blanketed in fog, soft and gray and bleak. It had been night when they had stepped through the door, but the looming gravestones are lit by the gloom that passes for daylight after the end of the world. He looks up, but the ever-present, ever-watching Eye feels—looks—feels distant, veiled by clouds.

Jon turns on his heel. The door is yellow, stark and startling against washed out world around them. Martin looks pale and washed out too, and Jon’s teeth clench so hard that it makes his jaw hurt. “Helen!” He tries the black iron handle on the door and is unsurprised when it doesn’t open. It’s set into the side of a chapel, and the edges blur strangely where they touch the weathered stone. “ _Open the door_ , Helen. This isn’t funny.” He begins knocking on the brightly painted wood, sharp and steady. There’s a satisfying echo from within, but no answer.

“I don’t think she’s listening,” Martin says faintly. He pulls the painter’s mask off from over his mouth and looks at it dazedly for a moment, like he’s not sure what the next step should be. He glances at the ground before shoving it conscientiously into his pocket.

Jon stops knocking. He lets his aching knuckles fall away, hand dangling uselessly by his side. When he drags in a breath, he expects the cold to burn, but instead the air just feels thick and heavy and wet against his tongue. “We’re—.”

“Yes,” Martin says, a sharp little splinter of an edge to his voice. “I know where we are.”

By rights, Martin shouldn’t—but he probably knows the look and the feel of the Lonely better than anyone living. Anyone save perhaps Jon, who had made a point of _knowing_ , truly knowing—but no. This place might be Lonely, but it’s not the same. It’s not following Martin and finding Peter Lukas, learning the Lonely until he can tear it apart like wet paper between his hands. Jon recognizes the churchyard, but he’s never been here before either, not really. He closes his eyes and counts to ten. He keeps counting even once he’s reached ten, but Naomi’s voice, thin and pleading and desperate, never comes. Months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine being disappointed by that. Now, he would like to feel confident that the damp grass beneath his feet is just the Beholding sticking pins in his sleeping brain.

“Come on,” he says. His voice is rough and his hand isn’t entirely steady when he holds it out to Martin. “Let’s find our way out.” _Again_.

The cemetery is very silent, and they haven’t gone far when Jon realizes that the silence isn’t just in his ears, it’s in his head. For the first time in months, the only fear he feels is his own. The shudder that goes through him feels as much like relief as dread.

_Seductive_ , he had once called the Lonely. _Insidious_. Even after everything that has happened, he can still see the appeal.

“Jon?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and he thinks it might even be mostly true, but he doesn’t like how Martin sounds. “You?”

Martin laughs, sharp and quick and swallowed by the fog almost before it can touch Jon’s ears. “Sure. Fine.”

Jon plants his feet. Martin doesn’t immediately notice and drags him forward a step by their linked hands before he also stumbles to a stop. The guilt on his face when he turns to look at Jon is almost a relief, not because he wants Martin to feel bad but because the last time they had been in the Lonely, Martin hadn’t looked much of anything other than cold and very, very far away. If Martin is standing there looking like he thinks that a bit of accidental manhandling is the equivalent of a war crime, then maybe he really is _fine_.

“It would be okay,” Jon says, and stumbles to a halt, tongue gone suddenly dry and clumsy, gluing itself to the roof of his mouth. He’s always been good with words the way that precocious children and avowed bibliophiles are good with words, but never the way that _people_ are good at words, has never known what to say when it really matters or when the point he’s trying to make is something other than dryly academic. This feels important. It feels like it matters. It feels like something he _should_ say, even if he doesn’t know how. “It would be okay, if you—that is to say—you can—it’s fine if you aren’t _fine_. You know that, right?”

Martin hasn’t been fine. Not for months. No one has been fine, but Martin—it’s different with Martin. They’re—something, and Jon is _excruciatingly_ aware that he’s about as good at being _something_ with anyone as he is at finding the right words when they matter, even under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. He’s distantly certain that he should be better at taking care of Martin by now. It’s only fair. Martin has always been so very good at taking care of him. Even before he’d known he’d needed that. Even when he hadn’t properly appreciated it.

Martin is looking at him. He tries to arrange his expression into something appropriately earnest, like someone who’s willing to listen, like someone who might actually be _good_ at listening, and not just because a sad story is something new to consume.

After a few moments Martin lets out a laugh. It’s a gasping, painful sort of noise, but it sounds real and solid the way that the sharp little fog-muffled crack of laughter earlier hadn’t. He doesn’t immediately stop, like once he’s started he _can’t._ He ends up leaning over and into Jon, forehead pressed too hard and heavy against Jon’s, breath warm against Jon’s cheek as his laugher turns into helpless little snorts. For a moment the cold white of the fog recedes, unimportant and ignored when held up against the way that Martin wrinkles his nose and closes his eyes so tight that the lids crease.

Not exactly the reaction Jon was going for, but he can’t bring himself to feel much in the way of regrets.

“Sorry,” Martin says. “Sorry, I just—your face, you—.”

“Yes, I know,” Jon says, a little cross but mostly fond. “I just—I need _you_ to know that it’s—.”

“Fine?” Martin’s eyes are open now, and his smile is wry.

“ _Yes_. And that you can talk to me.”

Martin is very close, forehead still resting against Jon’s and breath still warm, mouth smiling for the first time in what seems like a very long while. Jon thinks a little wistfully about tilting his chin up, closing his own eyes and seeing what he can get away with. “I will,” Martin says, and he sounds like he means it. “Just, uh. Maybe not right now.”

The reminder is like cold water poured directing over Jon’s idiotic, besotted head. He clears his throat and steps back, although he keeps his fingers tangled around Martin’s. “Right. We should—go.”

They don’t go far before Jon spots something in the gloom and the fog, a figure too tall and too irregular to be another gravestone. The figure is very still, and for a time he’s able to tell himself that it’s some statue of a bereaved angel, but as they grow closer it resolves itself into the form of a woman, tall and stately, slate-haired and dressed in mourning black. There’s a diamond brooch pinned near her collar, and the light that reflects off it is as cold as her eyes. He doesn’t know her, but she looks back at Jon like she knows him.

“Archivist,” she says, cool and cordial. “Pardon the lack of hospitality. You weren’t exactly expected company.” She has a good voice, deep and smooth and warmer than the rest of her, received pronunciation like a radio broadcaster.

Jon makes a guess. “Mrs. Lukas.” It’s a good guess. He remembers Naomi’s description well, those dozens of hard, reproachful faces. There had probably been any number of _Missus Lukases_ among them.

She smiles freezing and thin like a lake with ice too fragile to step out onto. “Irma, please. You were acquainted with my son, I believe—which makes you the closest connection the dear boy had. We should be more,” she pauses over the word, _chews_ over it, and her smile deepens, still cold but satisfied, “familiar.”

“Peter,” Martin guesses. It’s another good guess, and Jon feels his shoulders go stiff.

“Peter,” Irma Lukas agrees. “Don’t worry. I’m not cross with you. Quite the opposite. He was the last of my children, did you know that? The last, and my favorite. It’s a difficult thing to accomplish, not to love one’s child.” When she directs her smile at Martin there’s a crueler tilt to her mouth. “It was something of a relief, having him gone. If anything, you did me a favor. I’m closer to my god than ever I was before.” She turns her unblinking attention back to Jon, and he’s grateful. “You look like you have questions. Your kind always does. I’m more than willing to—to pay the ferryman, as it were. You may ask me whatever you like.”

It’s uncomfortable, being the center of her attention, as though the sensation of standing close to another person and still feeling desperately alone has become something tangible, pressed tight across his skin. Martin’s hand shifts in his own, sweaty and warm and real, grounding him, keeping him focused. “Is it—is it just you? I thought there were other Lukases.”

“They’ve faded now,” she says, pleasant and easy. “I expect I will, too, soon enough.”

Jon licks his lips. “You used to fund the Institute. Your family. You must know—something, something that the others don’t. I need to know if there’s a way to—to fight Elias. To _undo_ what he’s done.”

Irma’s brows creep up. There’s a strange sort of delight in her expression, still cold but almost dazzling. He realizes, disconcertingly, that he can see _though_ her, the outline of a stone gravestone crisscrossing her chest. “Oh. You still think that Bouchard is an enemy for you to defeat. You think you’ll finally confront the dragon in his lair and that will somehow change _anything_. How positively charming.”

Unease coils in Jon’s gut, but Martin speaks first. “What do you mean by that?”

Irma doesn’t break eye contact with Jon. “Go and see. Go and see Magnus in his Archives. You’ll understand, then.” She shrugs. “Or stay here. I won’t stop you, and you might find it—easier. It’s very easy, Archivist, deciding to be lonely. So much easier than one might think, even for people who crave, well, _people_. Maybe even easier for them. Rejection, loss, those things sting worse when they actually matter. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Blackwood?”

Jon bristles, and there’s something unkind on the tip of his tongue, possibly even something dangerous. He realizes suddenly enough for the realization to shake him that it might be a very _easy_ thing to end another member of the Lukas family. She’s half gone already. It would be easy, but the thought doesn’t sit easy, and for just a moment he regrets the strange silence here and the answering hush in his head, the fog that makes everything so terribly soft, because that means there’s nothing inside of him but his own thundering heartbeat and loud, awful thoughts.

_Listen to the quiet_ , Daisy’s voice murmurs in his head, and even here, it’s a comfort. Perhaps especially here.

“It _is_ easy,” Martin says. His shoulders are hunched, but the words come out calm and effortless. “That doesn’t make it better.”

There’s something new on Irma’s face, something that Jon hesitates to identify as _pity_ because believing _that_ feels like finding an open grave and sticking his foot in it. “If better is what either of you is hoping for, I might suggest that you adjust your expectations. Or that you abandon them entirely. Learn to _love_ your god, Archivist. Learn to live in the world you’ve built. If you can’t let go of _people_ , then figure out who’s worth it to you to save.”

“Everyone,” Jon says, and he works to make himself believe it. He thinks he succeeds. Gertrude’s methods have never had much appeal. They still don’t. There are so many things that don’t come _easy_ to Jon, but it’s rarely been anything but to decide that another person’s life isn’t an acceptable loss. Peter was the exception, not the rule.

Small victories, he supposes.

“Greedy boy,” Irma says, but she says it without much reproach. “None of us get everything we want. Those of us who learn to be what we are come the closest. Trust an old woman who’s buried all of her children. Well, most of them. There wasn’t much left of Peter _to_ bury. A pity. The funerals were always my favorite part.”

Jon doesn’t say anything, but his expression must do the speaking for him, because Irma Lukas sighs. It’s faint and disappointed and reminds him a little too strongly of another woman, slate-haired and elegant and distant. “You came for information. I’ve given you what I have, and if I’m not very much mistaken, you’ve decided to ignore it all.”

“Maybe not all of it,” Jon murmurs. _Go and see Magnus in his Archives_. He’s starting to think he has few other options remaining. The thought makes him feel a little sick.

“Then perhaps there’s hope for you, after all.” It doesn’t feel like a hopeful thing, hearing it from her lips. “Go back the way you came. I think you’ll find the door you came through is open now.”

**

It is.

There’s no sign of Helen, but they don’t have to walk far down that impossible hallway before they find another door, one that spits them out directly into Georgie’s flat.

“I don’t know what Helen was thinking,” Jon says as he pushes the door shut with a little more force than is strictly necessary. It shudders in its frame and then disappears immediately, and he tries hard not to feel like he’s been scolded.

“She knows you’ve been looking for Avatars,” Martin says. “Maybe she thought she was helping.” It’s a very _generous_ read on tossing both of them back into the Lonely without warning, and Jon smiles a little, reflexive and – if he’s being honest – a little relieved.

“I’m going to have a shower,” Martin says. His voice is brusque but there’s an answering smile on his lips, tired and worn but real. “Warm up.” For the first time since stepping through the door into the cemetery, Jon is aware of Martin’s thin joggers and his feet bare save for a pair of socks that are more hole than fabric, the t-shirt that’s barely enough to keep off the chill of Georgie’s flat much less the chill of the Lonely.

“Do that,” Jon says. The windows are dark, nothing but starless night outside, as though they had never been gone at all. Martin gives his hand a quick squeeze before stepping away, just as Georgie appears in the door to the kitchen.

“Keep it down, please,” she says. The Admiral undermines her point by streaming screaming around her ankles and making a beeline for Jon. His knees crack uncomfortably as he kneels and he doesn’t mind at all, because the second he offers his hand the cat starts rubbing his cheeks along Jon’s fingers, purring loud enough to fill the silence. “Melanie just got to sleep.”

“Sorry,” Jon says. “It’s been an—exciting night.”

“An exciting night?”

“I mean, the—with your neighbor, and then we—.”

“Jon,” she says, and there’s something strange about her voice, something that draws his gaze away from the Admiral and to her, standing tall and straight with her head limned in the light bleeding out from the kitchen like some kind of avenging angel. _Avenging_ is probably right, because she certainly sounds angry, but angry isn’t all she sounds. She sounds shaken. Not afraid, of course not that, but unsteady, off balance. “You’ve been gone for _three days_. Melanie’s been—she’s been beside herself. Daisy and Basira aren’t even _here_ , they’re out there, looking for you. We thought you were _dead_.”

“Oh,” he says, barely a word, just a soft, punched out gasp of a sound. Time passes strangely inside the Distortion. Inside the Lonely, too. He shouldn’t be surprised, so he’s not sure why he is. That explains Georgie’s anger, probably. “I—sorry.”

Georgie sighs, hard and harsh. “Yes. Well. You always are, aren’t you?”

He stands, and then tries very hard not to feel bad about the Admiral’s mewled protest at the loss of Jon’s attention. “Something to say, Georgie?” He doesn’t mean for it to sound quite so confrontational as it does, and he makes an effort to soften his tone when he speaks again. “Go ahead and say it."

“What’s there to say that I haven’t said already?” She turns on her heel, giving him her back. “What’s there to say that I haven’t said two or three or twenty times over?” She flips the kettle on and opens the cupboard door, and then she just stares into it, unmoving. “I tell you why I’m upset, you’re sorry, and then nothing changes. You play the same album on repeat and I—eventually I get sick of listening to it. It’s why we fell apart the first time. It’s why we’re not—.”

She falls silent.

“It’s why we’re not friends,” Jon says. He tries for understanding and mostly ends up sounding resigned, which he supposes is better than letting any of the cold lump in his throat spill out, the ache that feels less like he’s had his feelings hurt and more like—like grief. “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

She still doesn’t turn to look at him. Her chin jerks down, once, sharply, half hidden by the cupboard door. “Yes, Jon. It’s why we’re not friends. You do stupid things, things that would frighten me if I was capable of it, and you _know_ , you _know_ that what you’re doing is stupid, and you don’t stop. At this point, I don’t think you can. You don’t know how to put the brakes on, and I’m tired of sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for us to hit a wall.” She snorts and reaches up into the cupboard. “Although I suppose we already have.”

“Is that what this is about?” he demands. “Because I—.” He stops, the first faint stirrings of anger tangling around guilt and choking. It’s a ridiculous question. _Are you angry about a tiny, little thing like the end of the world_? Like that’s an irrational thing to be angry about. Of course she’s angry. It only seems irrational because the others have been so—accommodating.

She wheels on him in an instant, a mug in one hand, curls flying and cheeks flushed, all of that carefully banked anger suddenly blazing. _“No one blames you for the end of the world, Jon_.” She’s not loud, not yelling, and he doesn’t think it’s for his sake; he thinks it’s because she’s still conscious of Melanie, sleeping in the next room. “I’m not— _Christ_ , don’t you get it? You creep around my flat with your tail between your legs like you’re waiting to be scolded, like you’re waiting for one of us to finally say the words, but no one is going to. _No one_ blames you for that. We all heard what happened, that first night when you got here. Someone used you. Someone hurt you. The only person who thinks you were responsible for that, for what came after, is—well, you.”

Jon stands very still. He thinks that if she was less angry at him, he might not believe her, but she has none of Basira’s careful, penitent assignment of apocalyptic responsibility and none of Daisy’s sins and regrets to leave her sympathetic to his, none of Melanie’s—honestly, he’s not sure why Melanie has forgiven him. Because they’re friends, probably. Georgie isn’t his friend. Not anymore. There’s no reason for her to give him anything other than truth. The lump in his throat has grown and gone hard, difficult to breathe around and impossible to speak past.

They stand there in silence, until Georgie looks at the mug in her hand. Slowly, deliberately, she lifts it, and lets it drop onto the scuffed tiles of her kitchen floor. Jon sees it coming and still flinches at the crash, the way that ceramic splinters and shatters on impact. The handle skitters across the floor and stops only when it hits his foot.

Georgie is breathing hard. Her cheeks are still flushed. “I thought,” she says, calmer now, “that might make me feel better.”

“Oh,” Jon says. “Did it work?”

She starts to laugh, before she stops herself. “Not really.” She looks up from the mess she’s made, her eyes meeting his. “I’m not mad at you because the world ended, Jon. I’m—I’m not thrilled about it, but it wasn’t your fault. I’m not unreasonable. I’m mad at you because you—you don’t stop. You’re always running at the danger, or walking into it: reading your statements, looking for people who serve unspeakable horrors _as a lifestyle choice_ , racing into Cameron’s flat like two minutes to stop and think and _plan_ are going to make a real difference at the end of the day. You don’t think about the people around you, the people who _care_ about you, how it’s going to affect them.”

Jon swallows. “That’s all I think about.”

“No,” Georgie said, petal soft, all her anger – all of her vibrancy – drained away. “No, I don’t think it is, or you’d think about what gets left behind when—when your luck finally runs out. When you jump onto a grenade and it goes off in your face.” She shrugs. “I got tired of waiting for that to happen. I spent six months waiting by your hospital bed for you to wake up, half convinced that you never would, and—your heart wasn’t even beating, Jon. You weren’t breathing. Then you _did_ wake up, and that man was already at your bedside, and I realized that—that spending six months in a coma wasn’t the end of it, that you would just keep going, and going, and going, until you finally hit that wall, and I—I got _so_ tired of waiting for you to hurt me, because you couldn’t put the brakes on, because you didn’t care enough to save yourself and you were too focused on whatever you had decided needed doing to remember that I was sitting in the passenger seat.”

He breathes in. He breathes out. “I... see.”

“I don’t know that you do.”

“There’s no way to—fix this, is there? Fix us.”

She shrugs. There’s something quiet and aching on her face, past the remnants of her anger and the exhaustion that none of them are ever really without, and it’s the worst thing he’s ever seen. Seeing Georgie hurt and knowing he’s the cause has always been both the worst thing, and a little too familiar for comfort. “I don’t know.”

He stoops to pick up the shattered handle of the mug. It’s glazed a dark green. He thinks it might be one he’d bought her as a gift, the better part of a decade ago, something with an idiotic smiley cat face on it and a cartoonish speech bubble that had read _to kitty or not to kitty_. He’d hated it, but he’d thought she might not. “Would it help,” he says, “if I told you that I’m not particularly interested in—crashing the car, or throwing myself on the grenade, or whatever metaphor we’re using?” He thinks about disposing of the piece of mug, but there’s a sea of pottery shards and Georgie’s resolute shoulders between him and the bin. “That I want to survive this—or, or, more than survive it, really, that I—.”

Mercifully, Georgie cuts him off. “It would be a start.”

He’s not sure what to say. He’s not sure what he _can_ say, and he’s not given the opportunity to figure it out. The fluorescents above them give a harsh buzz, and then they flicker out.

“What—.”

Alarm stirs briefly in the pit of Jon’s stomach, but his eyes are already slipping closed. He wants—he wants, suddenly and without provocation, to look through the window at the far end of the kitchen, the one that faces the street. He knows that there’s something out there for him to _see_ , but he’ll slice open his feet on broken crockery if he tries and, quite frankly, even were he willing to do so, he has far enough to go in proving to Georgie that he won’t hurt himself to satiate his curiosity without adding that kind of evidence to her case against him.

Sunil Ghosh is already at his bedroom window, eight years old and curious despite his fear and the end of his world as only a child can be. Sunil is very good at sharing his toys on the playground, takes a certain pride in making sure everyone gets a turn on the swings; it had once made him popular among his classmates in a way that Jon had barely even known how to long for at the same age. Jon is certain he won’t mind sharing his eyes, just for a moment.

He’s left with only the vaguest of impressions before Sunil’s courage fails him and he ducks back beneath the blankets: neat shoulder-length locs and a slash of red fabric bright enough to be seen even in the darkness stretched across a handsome but unfamiliar face.

“There’s someone outside.”

“I see him.” He hears Georgie’s slow exhale from beside the kitchen window. “I know him.”

Jon doesn’t, the face Sunil had seen was unfamiliar, but Jon knows something else: a certain feeling hovering on the street outside of their cozy little flat, like if a full stop could be an emotion.

“I think—I think I need to speak with him.”

To his own ears, it sounds like he’s asking permission. He knows he’ll do it whether Georgie approves or not, but he still finds himself waiting for—for her blessing, he supposes.

He can barely see her in the dark, but he hears her shoes crunch across what remains of the mug he had once given her. “Let me get my coat.”

**

“Finally,” Oliver says, with some satisfaction, “our protagonist arrives on the scene.”

The cake is long gone, but Annabelle has entertained herself by scratching vague patterns into the smears of frosting that remain on the plate with the tines of her fork. “Did you know,” she says, “that in literary analysis, the protagonist is often defined as that character with _agency_?”

Oliver considers that. “Not nice,” he decides, and ignores his own unease at the way her eyes light with amusement. Her fork scrapes against the plate, harder this time, making him shudder reflexively at the sound and providing him with an unfortunate reminder that Annabelle very much enjoys playing with her food.

“I never claimed to be,” Annabelle replies, “but none of us can pretend that I’m not the one driving the plot.”


	6. Chapter 6

Their visitor is waiting for them on the pavement, standing on the dark smear of concrete the Boneturner had left behind. He’s still and patient as a statue, at least until a cold blast of air comes wailing down the street. Then he shivers and chafes his hands together. It’s a very _human_ gesture, and Jon tries hard not to let that influence him. Nothing fully human could walk up to their door after dark, blindfolded but unworried and unscathed.

“Jon?” the man asks, and he almost sounds—friendly. Like they’re just old acquaintances run into each other unexpectedly on the street. “That is you, isn’t it, Jon?” Jon remains silent, and the man clears his throat. “I’m sorry, you don’t mind being called that these days, do you? I asked once before, but you weren’t really in any fit state to answer. If you prefer _Archivist_ , can do, I just always thought it was a little—.”

They all call him _Archivist_ now, he realizes, everyone he’s spoken to in the last few weeks who isn’t Melanie or Georgie, Daisy or Basira or Martin. Even Helen calls him _Archivist_ , and she had always used _Jon_ or _Jonathan_ before. He hates it, and maybe that’s why he breaks his silence to say, “Jon is fine.”

“I’m—it’s Oliver. I’m not sure if you knew that?”

“I thought it was _Antonio_ ,” Georgie says, her voice icy.

Oliver startles. Maybe he hadn’t expected anyone but Jon. He looks a little embarrassed, Jon thinks, but his voice is steady when he says, “If you like. Not too attached to either of them, these days, honestly, and I always thought that _Antonio_ was kind of—I don’t know, romantic? Not like _Oliver_ , but that’s the name my mum gave me, if that’s what matters to you.”

“I know you,” Jon says, abruptly. He knows the _voice_ , at least, but the moment he says it he knows more: a hospital bed, the ticking of the clock and the conspicuous silence of the heart rate monitor, a statement, a choice.

He stops feeling disarmed by the way that Oliver is nattering on and starts to feel worried, although he’s not sure why. Oliver is smiling a little, and the smile looks genuine because he also looks like he’s surprised to be smiling. “Do you? I wasn’t sure you’d remember.” He sighs. “Almost makes me feel bad about luring you out here, but she wasn’t sure you’d come if she was the one waiting, and you, well, you know how hard it is to say _no_ to—.”

_The spiders._

“Georgie, get inside,” Jon says, but someone else is already speaking, a darker shadow is already peeling away from the shadows of the street.

“Ruining my entrance, Ollie?” Annabelle Cane asks. He’s never seen her before, but there’s no mistaking her: a half inch of dark roots showing near her scalp but otherwise immaculate in a wide-legged green jumpsuit and a boxy houndstooth coat, more untouched by the apocalypse than anyone Jon’s seen since leaving Scotland. Her eyes are liquid black from lid to lid and for just a moment there are too many of them, studding her cheeks and the smooth skin of her forehead, before he blinks and finds two perfectly normal brown eyes looking back at him, and perhaps she _could_ be any girl with a penchant for vintage clothing and a bleach job that needs touching up, were it not for the thick clot of silver spider silk stretching across her temple.

“Whoops.” Oliver doesn’t sound particularly apologetic, and Jon almost – almost – likes him again, almost finds him endearingly human with his chilled hands and his disaffected tone, would were it not for the avatar of the Web standing a few dangerous feet away from him, from _Georgie_.

“We’re leaving,” he says, voice and throat tight, and Georgie casts him a curious glance, because she doesn’t, _can’t_ , understand the danger they’re in. Her lips firm up into something determined and familiar as she looks at him, and she catches the elbow of Jon’s jumper before taking a step back toward the door of the building. Something like relief shudders through Jon. They might not be friends, but she still trusts him enough for this, to look at him and use his fear as a gauge for how afraid she _should_ be.

“Don’t be like that, Jon,” Annabelle says. There’s something about the tilt of her smile, like she’s laughing behind her teeth at a joke he isn’t privy to. “Our world is over. Can’t we just call it bygones?”

Jon considers that. “No,” he says, the lump of unease in his gut answering for him. “No, I, that—seems unwise.”

“We’re on the same side.” Annabelle’s eyes are wide and every word vibrates with sincerity. He trusts her careful sincerity even less than he does her smile.

“I really don’t think we are,” Georgie says. She plucks at the arm of Jon’s jumper, and he follows her back toward the building, stumbling because he doesn’t want to take his eyes off of the two people in front of them.

“We’re leaving,” Jon says again, but he’s less certain this time. He’s curious. He can’t help himself. He’s _never_ been able to help himself, and Annabelle is a mystery of long standing. Even now, he can feel the questions hovering at the tip of his tongue, the demands, the sure knowledge that if he asks her to tell him her story, to give him her statement, to for once just _tell the truth_ , plain and unadorned, she won’t have any choice but to do so. That’s why she’d left her initial statement on paper; it’s obvious, in retrospect. There’s something she doesn’t want him to know, but it could so easily not matter _what_ she wants.

Georgie is standing next to him. Martin is inside, fingers leaving streaks on the bathroom mirror as he wipes away the steam, unaware that there’s anything amiss. Annabelle is a danger, to him, to all of them. His questions don’t mean much, stacked against that. “You should leave, too.”

Annabelle’s smile widens. There’s still some joke he’s not getting. “Make me.”

The faint, gobsmacked noise he hears himself make is a little funny. He wonders why he had ever expected her to accept a _no_.

“Yes,” Annabelle says, almost gentle, “that’s what I thought. You could rip the truth out of me, maybe even _see me_ so clearly that there’s not much left of me in the aftermath, but you’re not going to. Not when I’m here, offering the hand of friendship—and not while you’re so _very_ uncertain that doing so will neutralize me as effectively as it did the courier and whichever Lukas it was you blew to bits. Remember, I know what makes you tick, Jon. Probably better than you do. You won’t risk having me so close to home and feeling vengeful in the aftermath.”

“I might.”

“You won’t. And you can’t actually force me to leave. Can you?” She sounds genuinely curious, but Annabelle is the consummate pretender and he’s certain the answer to her question is clear to both of them.

Annabelle’s lashes droop, turning her eyes shuttered and secretive. “The basement is empty, isn’t it?” She smiles at Georgie. “Other than the bodies. A little rough for my tastes, but I’ve had worse, and my friend here could use a rest. It will do.”

“Annabelle,” Oliver says, but he offers no further protest.

“Don’t worry,” Annabelle steps past Oliver, past Jon, winks saucily at Georgie with four gleaming black eyes in Jon’s peripheral vision until he turns his head and finds nothing but soft cheeks, gleaming spider silk, and the appropriate number of eyes for a person to have. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

It sounds more like a threat than a reassurance.

“Find me when you’re ready,” Annabelle says, and Jon hears the front door to the building swing shut behind her. Panic spurts through him, but now that he _knows_ she’s there, he also knows that she hasn’t approached the stairs leading to the first floor or any of the doors to the ground floor flats. She’s being as good as her word, the heels of her boots finding the creaking steps that lead down into the basement, long puppeteer’s fingers catching the dangling cord that clicks on the single bare light bulb. The power has – miraculously – come back on.

He stands there, stock still, Georgie’s hand still on his elbow.

Oliver lets out a long, shuddering sigh, forcing Jon’s attention back to him. “She’s left me out here alone, hasn’t she? She’s left me out here alone so she can have her dramatic exit.”

**

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” Oliver says. There’s a burst of laughter from the corner table. One of the servers jumps and nearly tips his tray. It’s the first time anyone here has heard laughter in months, whether the rest of the staff and diners realize it or not.

Something bounces off Oliver’s shoulder and lands on the ground. He twists in his seat. There’s a crumpled up napkin on the floor. He picks it up. The logo rooster’s one eye stares back at him, and printed below that are the words _I’d look good in your lap_. Someone has added a phone number to one side of that little bit of corporate salaciousness.

He looks over his shoulder. The girl, the one with the malignancy curled tight and warm between her ribs, is clearly trying not to laugh, her hand pressed hard against her mouth. She gets herself mostly under control and drops her hand long enough to shout, “Sorry!” in his general direction. One of her friends has gone practically radioactive with embarrassment, which gives him a good idea of whose number he now has in his possession. He lifts his hand in vague acknowledgement and turns his back on them.

Annabelle sighs. “ _Babies_. Were we ever that young?”

It had taken Oliver two drinks and a lot of friendly encouragement to talk to the last guy he’d ended up dating, before the corners of his world had started bleeding red and romance had kind of gone off the table. Graham. He hasn’t thought of Graham in—eons, it feels like, as though six years of his life and the kind of stupid love that made a breakup seem like the end of the world hadn’t really mattered after all. “Think I might’ve been,” he says, tucking the crumpled up napkin into the neck of one of Annabelle’s empty beer bottles, where it’ll be cleared away later. “You know. Once.”

**

Daisy and Basira are at the kitchen table when Jon emerges from Georgie’s recording-studio-turned-second-bedroom late the next morning, both of them with mugs of coffee between their hands and deep shadows beneath their eyes. Someone has to have told them that Jon and Martin made it back, but Daisy still grabs him in a hug tight enough that he’s certain his remaining ribs creak.

He meets Basira’s gaze over Daisy’s shoulder.

“So,” he says, “Annabelle Cane is living in the basement now.”

_“What?”_

**

“I just—I’m not sure we have a choice, anymore.”

Martin looks troubled. Melanie looks mutinous, maybe even a little _murderous_ , and it’s not like Jon can blame her.

“All right,” Basira says. “Let’s do it.”

No one is happy, but no one argues.

**

The Magnus Institute hangs over them, and it’s—.

_I love the Institute’s building, of course, it’s beautiful,_ a voice that Jon doesn’t recognize murmurs in the back of his head. He feels suddenly sad, and he doesn’t know why.

It is beautiful, he supposes, and it’s familiar, like coming home. Most of his early associations with the word _home_ are not of comfort; the comparison holds up. It’s also not what it once was. Part of the façade looks singed, as though someone had done their level best to set stone alight. There are claw marks scoring the doors, but when Jon pushes against them they barely budge. He doesn’t think it’s just wood and glass and metal standing in his way. The windows – the ones on the doors, and the ones studding the walls of the Institute like dark, staring eyes – are all intact, which strikes him as strange.

“I could try kicking it in,” Daisy says. “Again.”

“You tried—never mind.”

“No need,” Melanie says. Her progress up the stairs is steady, cane flicking in one direction and then the other, until she’s standing beside Jon. She knocks on one of the doors, the impact of her knuckles cracking soft and hollow against the wood. “Hey. Helen?”

A scorchingly yellow replacement for the leftmost of the Institute’s twin sets of double doors materializes out of nothing.

Melanie clears her throat. “She, uh—she said she was sorry. This morning, while you were sleeping in. I don’t think she realized what she was—okay, she probably did. She likes playing games. But she’s still trying to help. I’m pretty sure. If you’re willing to risk it.” She shrugs, and he doesn’t think she would blame him if the answer was _no_.

Jon breathes deep. “It’s fine.” He pushes open the door.

The lobby of the Magnus Institute sprawls out before him. There’s a dried puddle of rusty red near the toes of his shoes, and he draws up short, but Basira is already shouldering in beside him, her expression smooth and impassive. “Looks like Elias hasn’t done any cleaning up,” she says, before placing herself deliberately in front of Jon and taking those first hesitant steps into the Institute. She swats aside the dangling end of a ratty piece of police tape, and he realizes that none of the damage inside is new to the apocalypse, that this is what remains of the day that the Institute had ended, not the day the world had. “Come on.”

They split off into groups. Jon ends up down in the Archives with Basira, staring at the trap door that leads to the tunnels. Or rather, staring at the place where the trap door had once been. Now there’s only a pale square of concrete, new and sloppy against the decades old cork flooring.

“Looks like Elias did some remodeling after all,” Basira says.

“Yes. Very—efficient.”

“Yeah.”

Jon turns his head. The rows of shelving with their binders and file boxes are the same as they’ve ever been, and suddenly he feels like he can’t breathe. “I hate being back here.”

“Me too.”

“We’re just delaying the inevitable, aren’t we?”

Basira catches his eye and smiles, quick and wry and humorless. Jon’s chest expands, fills. “His office?”

“His office.”

They’re the first to arrive. Maybe the others are more reluctant, or maybe they just haven’t _known_ since walking through the front door Helen had created that this is where Elias is to be found. By some unspoken agreement, none of them so much as look in the direction of Elias’ office until Martin and Melanie come whispering to the top of the stairs. They stop speaking immediately when they see the rest of the group already present, and the resulting silence has an uncomfortable, choking, _waiting_ quality to it.

Daisy pushes the palm of her hand against the door. “This one, I can kick in.”

“Why—.” Jon catches sight of the gleam in her eyes and swallows the rest of his question. “Go on. Have fun.”

She doesn’t take her foot to the door; she uses her shoulder. She does look like she’s having fun. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright, and if he were to concentrate he’s certain he could feel the blood thrumming through her veins, not consumed by the Hunt but still hunting, every part of her honed to a needle pointing directly past those six inches of solid wood and at her quarry.

The door gives before Daisy does. Jon isn’t surprised.

She steps to the side once she’s done, and Jon doesn’t want to be the first one though that door but he finds himself stepping forward anyway. There’s not much light to see by. Elias’ renovations have apparently not included a generator and electricity. The faint, sickly glow of the Eye streams through the windows and in from the hall, but Jon doesn’t really need it, just as he hadn’t in Cameron’s flat, and—.

There’s something behind the desk, a place where the shadows are denser and darker.

“Jon,” Elias says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

The tone and the cadence are as familiar as the front steps of the Magnus Institute. Jon had last heard them coming from his own mouth, ripped from his own unwilling tongue. Muscles knot and twist up and down his spine, and he’s so distracted by memory that he almost doesn’t notice the ragged edge to Elias’ voice. Almost.

He _looks_.

Greasy, matted hair. Hands caked with dried concrete and worse. Clothing that looks like it’s been slept it, restlessly and for more than one night running. The satisfied smile is the same, but the eyes tell a different and more honest story: wide enough that Jon can see white edging the irises and wild. _Afraid_.

He looks. He _understands_.

Laughter cracks the silence, and Jon knows it’s his own, knows the reaction is an inappropriate one from the worried glance Basira shoots his way. “Jon?” Martin asks, hushed and unsure, and Jon wishes he could explain, for their sake if nothing else, because he knows that they don’t see what he does.

“How are you enjoying your apocalypse?” Jon asks, once he can. “Is it everything you hoped for, Jonah? This world _we_ made?”

Jonah Magnus is silent.

“How does it feel to—how did you put it? To be _king of a ruined world_?” Jonah— _Elias_ stares back at Jon with glittering eyes. _“Answer me.”_

Elias doesn’t, but this time, this time it looks like it costs him something not to. Jon would bet that it doesn’t _tingle_ , judging by the way that Elias ends up slumped, sweating and panting, against his desk.

“Don’t test me, Jonathan,” he says, as though anything he can say would make Jon _unknow_ what he now knows, as though his threats have any meaning now. “I’m not what I once was, but I’m not completely toothless.”

“No,” Jon says, cold. “I suppose something will have to be done about that.”

The answering fear has a certain savor as it slides against Jon’s tongue and coats his throat, pools in his belly until it drowns out his own and dulls the places where the edges of his hunger would be if he wasn’t so very well-fed. For a moment he’s thrilled, satisfied, until reality sets in and leaves him feeling cold and hollow and a little sick.

Elias looks thin. Starved. Afraid. And Jon—Jon finally understands.

“There’s nothing he can tell us,” Jon says, and, “I’m going to wait outside.”

_“Jon,”_ Georgie says, faint and indignant, and he hears Martin echo it in a softer voice. He’s at the door when he hears his name for a third time in Elias’ strident tones. “Jon. Jon, _come back here_. We’re not done yet. You’re still my Archi—.”

_Archivist_ , his mind says, filling in the blank, even as he knows what Elias means to say: _you’re still my Archive_.

“I quit,” he snaps, and he feels something else snap too, thin and tenuous as spider silk, barely a tether at all.

He walks blindly and nearly stumbles going down the stairs. Then he’s outside, panting in air he doesn’t need to breathe, wondering if it would be unwise or just pointless to find somewhere to sit down and tuck his head between his knees. Instead he fumbles at the pockets of his coat until he finds the crushed remnants of a pack of cigarettes. He hasn’t smoked much in the past few months, another hunger that no longer seems to trouble him, but tucking the cigarette between his lips still feels familiar enough to be a comfort.

The lighter he produces from beneath the pack in his pocket is cold metal against his fingers, and the etched pattern of a spider’s web stares up at him like he’s never seen it before. He’s still gazing blankly down at the lighter cradled in the palm of his hand when _something_ comes prowling up the street.

It skulks low to the pavement, shaped like a dog but not a dog, black the way that an oil slick is black. The dim light of the not-sun above seems to bend and twist around it, a science fiction author’s imagining of what a black hole might look like. When it growls, that bends too, as if sound could collapse inward and still be heard rather than echoing out. It has no eyes. It does have teeth.

It creeps closer to him.

Jon isn’t afraid. He _knows_ now.

_King of a ruined world_ , but Elias isn’t the one wearing the crown.

“Stop,” Jon says.

_Wait_ , he’d told Karolina Górka. _Stop_ , he’d said, and she had, and he’d stupidly though it was—that she was obliging him because she’d chosen to.

It stops. Somewhere in the back of what isn’t a throat, it whines, low and resounding enough for him to feel it in his bones.

“Leave,” he says.

He’s not surprised when it turns on its tail and goes, moving as quickly as it can while holding itself so low to its ground that its belly nearly drags against the pavement.

He watches it go. His flicks the lighter a couple times, but his thumb keeps slipping against the striker and eventually he gives up.

“Hey.”

Martin is standing behind him, shoulders framed narrowly by a door that had been Helen’s until she had decided that it no longer needed to be her door. It doesn’t matter. It’s open now.

Jon stretches out a hand, foolish, needy, but Martin doesn’t hesitate to step forward and take it.

“Are you okay?”

_Fine_ , Jon almost says, but then he says, “Not really. You?”

Martin lets out a shuddering breath. “No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Jon’s mouth is doing something, and it takes him a moment to realize he’s smiling, strange and awful and stretched. He’s still not very good at this. Martin looks understandably skeptical. Jon still isn’t very good at this, but maybe he’s good enough, because eventually Martin says, soft, “Okay.”

“Let’s walk back,” Jon says.

Martin looks up the street. “Isn’t that—.”

“No,” Jon says gently. “There’s nothing out there that can hurt us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> give me a scene with a monster lady and i'll give you an increased chapter count, because monster ladies are gr8 and i have no restraint


	7. Chapter 7

The streets are the emptiest Jon has ever seen them, emptier even then they have been during his brief forays into the outside world to track down information. The fog is dense, and it might’ve stirred fears both old and new about stepping unexpectedly into the Lonely, but the Eye hangs low in the sky, steady and fixed on him, and around him he can feel the pounding fear of what remains of the city’s population, tucked into houses and flats and derelict restaurants, anywhere that seems even remotely safe.

Nowhere is safe. Not for anyone—except Jon.

“I know I’m supposed to be the one doing the talking,” Martin says, “but do you maybe want to explain why we’re taking a stroll through the post-apocalyptic hellscape? Not that I, uh, not that I’m not enjoying it.” Their hands are linked, and the tips of Martin’s ears are red, but Jon can feel the whisper of Martin’s fear too, shivering along the edge of his awareness, too familiar and too important to be drowned out by the terror of an entire world in spite of Jon’s best efforts to give Martin what privacy he can.

“At least you can’t claim dates with me are boring,” Jon says. It’s an awful joke, but Martin chuckles anyway. There’s a taxi with its front wheels up on the pavement in front of them, and Jon lets Martin tug him out into the street to walk around it. Oncoming traffic is no longer a concern; the others, packed into a car belonging to one of Georgie’s neighbors, are navigating London’s streets even more slowly than Jon and Martin are on foot, turning down side streets and inching around a rush hour’s worth of abandoned vehicles.

“Elias succeeded,” Jon says. “Spectacularly. But he also failed spectacularly. He thought that—that I would end the world, and that he would rule over it. It doesn’t seem to have worked out like that.” Jon takes a deep breath. “He ended the world, but he’s not the one in control. I—I’m fairly certain that _I_ am.”

“I—wow.” Martin is watching him out of the corner of his eye, and for once it’s nothing other than pleasant to be watched. “What does that mean?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. It means we can walk safely back to Georgie’s. Beyond that, I suppose we’ll see.” He skims his thumb over Martin’s knuckles and watches that instead of Martin’s face. “I wish I’d realized sooner.” He laughs a little, quiet and humorless. “We might’ve had an easier time of it getting here from Scotland, at the very least. I wonder if I—if I’ve known all along. I knew that I could feel it, how afraid everyone is, but I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew—.” It’s a horrible kind of truth, the same as he and Daisy had exchanged sitting at a rickety table so many days ago, but he knows that he can trust Martin with that, that he can be awful and not be hated. He has, unfortunately, tested Martin’s capacity for that kind of forgiveness before. “I knew I wasn’t hungry anymore. I knew that all of this horror was feeding me, and I didn’t think to wonder why.”

“Did you—.”

“I hated it,” Jon says. “I would rather have starved.” He breathes in deep through his nose. The air is cold enough to burn. He had – does – hate it, but it had also felt good and right to have all of that fear flowing through him, _into_ him. That he was satiated because others were in anguish, _that_ had been awful, sickening, but the second part doesn’t cancel out the first. “I hope I would have rather starved. We both know that my—my track record isn’t exactly flawless.”

Martin’s fingers convulse around his, hard enough to make his bones ache. “You were doing just fine in Scotland,” he says. There’s a sharp, sudden, prickling defensiveness to him, and he’s no longer looking at Jon.

“Martin?”

Martin doesn’t immediately respond, and Jon tells himself that he’ll be satisfied if silence is the only answer that Martin is willing to give, even if they had agreed to talk, even if it would be so easy just to _know_. The idea is shockingly unappealing, given how tempting it generally is.

“You called this a date,” Martin says eventually. “I used to think about that a lot, you know? Going on a date with you. Nothing complicated, just—something like this, I guess. Without the, the world-being-over part. Taking a walk. Holding your hand. That’s—I wanted that. That’s all I wanted.” He flicks a glance in Jon’s direction and his face does something both mortified and fond. “Yes. Okay. Maybe that’s not _all_ I wanted, you can stop looking so pleased with yourself.” His ears have gone red again. Jon tries not to feel too smug, or look too _pleased with himself_ about the knowledge, sure as anything the Beholding has ever shown him and better for being _his_ , that if he kisses Martin just right, if he presses fingers just hard enough against the back of Martin’s neck or the soft skin at his waist, Martin will go all dazed and breathless, his cheeks pink and most of his capacity for speech gone. 

“Didn’t think there was much chance of it, of course,” Martin says, and most of Jon’s smugness drains away in a tide of regret. “Scotland was,” he stutters to a stop. “Good,” he decides. “Scotland was good.”

The slant of weak gray-gold sunlight through the bedroom window, and the pleasant scratch of the eye-scalding neon green wool blanket they’d found in the cottage’s linen cupboard against his cheek. The humid puff of hot air on his skin as one of the neighbor’s cows shoved her snout against the palm of his hand. The way Martin had stopped reflexively hesitating, toward the end, before touching Jon’s shoulder as they squeezed past each other in the kitchen or brushing a kiss against his cheek or rambling for a solid quarter hour about the most recent dog or chicken or cow he had seen on his way to or from the village. “It was good,” Jon says. He wonders if the him he had been years ago, the one who had left Martin with the impression that there would never be much of a chance for them, would recognize his voice now, the way it goes gentle and a little uneven.

“I wasn’t,” Martin says. “Not at first.”

There’s a curious tightness at the base of Jon’s sternum. “I know.” He remembers the nightmares too, and the way he’d walked into the bedroom one morning to find Martin gazing blankly at a black t-shirt with the words _World’s Okayest Boss_ printed across the front, which Jon barely remembered owning and which Basira must have thrown into his bag in the scramble to get them out of London. Tim had given it to him the year he’d pulled Jon’s name for the gift exchange, a few scant weeks after Jon’s promotion. For a minute they had just stood there, looking at each other, like bystanders at the scene of a particularly horrific car crash who couldn’t quite process what had just happened.

“But I was—I was starting to get better. I was starting to think that—that things might _be_ better, and then—God, it’s stupid, I shouldn’t be—.”

“It’s not stupid,” Jon says, fierce. He tugs on Martin’s hand until Martin stops walking. Martin’s eyes are wide and wild when he wheels to face Jon, dry but tellingly red-rimmed. “It’s not _stupid_ , Martin. Not to me. Not at _all_. The world ended. Our—our whole world was upended, for _years_ before Elias ever—there’s no reason you should have to be _fine_ through all of that. Everyone—.”

“That’s just it,” Martin says. His breathing is ragged, wet. “Everyone is going through it. I can’t be the one falling apart. Not while people need me. Not while _you_ need me.”

It’s impulse and the deep throb of longing still sitting like a lump just below his heart that has Jon reaching up to grab the collar of Martin’s coat and pull him down and in, until their foreheads are resting against each other and their breath is pooling close and warm between them, cutting through the cold air and bleeding into the surrounding fog. It’s longing alone that has him bridging the distance, mouth just barely catching against Martin’s. Martin makes a faint noise, and then he’s surging forward, sudden and desperate, like maybe he’d never meant to stop kissing Jon at all. His free hand comes up to curl against the shaggy hair at the back of Jon’s head. His bottom lip is dry, chapped, and it catches pleasantly against the corner of Jon’s mouth.

“I need you,” Jon says, once they break apart. He leans forward again to prove his point, kissing aimlessly at the edge of Martin’s upper lip, his cheek, the prickling curve of his chin. When he pulls back, allows half an inch of space between them, his teeth taste like salt. “And I know I—I wasn’t in a good place, right after it happened. I know you ended up picking up the slack and holding us together because I couldn’t. I understand, but that was never meant to be a permanent arrangement.” He laughs, a wobbling, wild little burst of sound. “If you’d like, we can take turns being useless wrecks. That seems equitable, doesn’t it? Perhaps work out some kind of schedule. We can—.”

_“Jon.”_

Jon leans into him, and for a while they just stand there, so close that Jon can feel the tension slowly leaching out of Martin’s shoulders. Martin is silent for long enough for Jon to press a biting little kiss into the edge of his jaw, just to hear the faint, wanting noise he makes in response and see the way his cheeks go pink. “Martin?”

“Hmm?” The sound buzzes nicely against Jon’s mouth, and he tries not to feel overly smug about how dazed Martin sounds. After a second, Martin clears his throat. “Yes. Fine. Point, uh, made.”

Jon presses a final clumsy kiss to Martin’s neck and steps back. He pretends he can’t feel the way he’s smiling, foolish and smitten and aching wide. He makes himself sound sure when he says, “It was good,” and, “We’ll make it good again.”

Martin stares at him, soft and solemn and maybe still a little glazed in a way that makes all of Jon’s careful plans not to be too pleased with himself fall away. “I believe you.” Martin says, and that’s enough. That’s good. That’s _perfect_.

**

“Took you two long enough,” Daisy says, coming out of the fog _behind_ them as they approach Georgie’s building. Martin startles.

“Where did you come from?”

“I got tired of sticking my head through the window, so Basira let me out of the car to run off some of the energy.” Martin looks like he’s trying to parse how much of that is true, and Daisy gives his shoulder a friendly shove. “We were worried. I shadowed you most of the way back to make sure nothing decided you looked like a tasty treat.”

“Ah,” Martin says faintly. His face has reacquired that faint rosy glow. “And how much did you—I mean—.”

Daisy snorts. “Relax. I know I worked for the Institute, but I was never much of one for _watching_.” Jon thinks it’s imagination that makes her canines look sharper when she smiles. Martin doesn’t look particularly reassured.

“The concern is appreciated,” Jon says, “but, as it turns out, unnecessary.”

Daisy studies him, and perhaps the Beholding never really had much of a claim on her, but he still gets the impression that she hasn’t missed much. “Oh?” she says, something gentle in her voice that belies the feral gleam to her eyes. “Let’s get inside, then. You can explain without having to say it twice, and I think we could all use the chance to regroup.”

**

There is a brief but intense standoff over the kettle. Georgie and Martin share a coping mechanism, it would appear. Georgie’s claim is probably the better one – it is _her_ flat, after all – and Jon is a little surprised when she cedes control of the battlefield and allows Martin to rifle through her cupboards for mugs and teabags and sugar.

The standoff happening at the kitchen table is only slightly less intense, and Jon can feel himself losing the high ground by the minute. “It has to be done, Jon,” Melanie says. “You said so yourself. Don’t chicken out on me now.”

“I’m not—.” Jon sighs. “Basira?”

She has to know why she’s the one he asks, but one look at her face tells him that he’ll be getting no help from that quarter. “It makes sense. I don’t love it, but—well, I also don’t hate my chances, and I don’t know that we’re going to get a better one by waiting.”

“Who says we have to do anything at all?” Daisy asks. It’s not like Daisy to hesitate, or to flinch, but he understands why this is the exception. Why this has _always_ been the exception, even before the Buried. “You saw him.”

“You _heard_ him. We can’t just leave him holed up in his lair. Jon, you know better than anyone that tucking Elias into some faraway corner and assuming he won’t bother us again doesn’t work. He’ll find some way to twist things to his benefit. If we’re going to do anything, if we’re going to be _able_ to do anything, we’re going to have to deal with the obvious knife pointed at our back first.”

“Both of the obvious knives,” Jon mutters. He takes the tea Martin offers him, and prepares to wave the metaphorical white flag of surrender. “You win. Tomorrow morning.”

**

Daisy has been prowling around the perimeter of the building for the past half hour. She does that sometimes, especially after dark. It’s never been entirely necessary, or entirely useful – so many of the things that might come at them aren’t likely to be stopped by a locked door or by someone standing sentry outside – but it seems to make her feel better on the days when they’re all just drowning in the sheer bloody futility of it all, the way the world has fallen to pieces and there’s nothing anyone can do to strap it back together again. It’s even less necessary tonight, given what Jon had told them, except for the fact that it makes her feel better. Basira watches the clock, gives her another twenty minutes, and then grabs a cup of instant coffee from Georgie’s kitchen and goes downstairs.

“Thanks,” Daisy says as she takes the mug and cradles it between her palms, savoring the warmth even though she no longer seems to really feel the cold. Her head is tilted, listening to something that Basira can’t hear from up the street, and a few minutes pass before she speaks again. “I hate this.” She’s using her coffin voice again, soft and yielding, wrapped in the tattered remains of her old hardnosed courage. Basira doesn’t mind it anymore; these days it mostly makes her want to answer softness with softness and the half-disbelieving gratitude of someone who has, against all odds, been given a _third_ chance. It’s pretty embarrassing, to be honest, but she doesn’t much mind that, either.

“I know.”

“I should at least be with you.”

“We talked about this, Daisy. Better odds if everyone is with _someone_ who knows what to do if things go south.”

Daisy’s mouth does something strange. “Someone who’s not afraid to get bloody, you mean.”

There’s no real arguing that. Basira has a distant kind of hope that someday Daisy will get the chance to put all that down the way she’d wanted to, fold the Hunt up as small as will go inside of her without leaving her starving. She hopes, but she’s less good at fooling herself than she used to be. There’s probably not much likelihood of that happening, even if Jon does somehow fix the world. Maybe especially then. It’s possible that third chances don’t last, either, and Basira has—she’s made her peace with that, as much as she can.

“I love you,” she says, instead of answering.

They’ve become better at saying the words. They’ve stopped wasting what time they have. If it all blows up tomorrow, or a week from now, or in a year, she’ll have had that much, at least.

“Yeah,” Daisy says, and leans in until her shoulder is braced warm and solid against Basira’s. “Love you, too.”

**

“Hey.”

Melanie drops onto the cushion next to Martin, and he hesitates only a moment before deciding not to scoot himself up tight against the sofa’s arm to keep their hips from touching. She doesn’t seem to mind the proximity, and he—he’s never really known what to make of Melanie, who had become so angry and so much like a stranger before he’d ever really had the chance to know her at all. He doesn’t really know what to make of Melanie, but he likes her. Of course he does, even if sometimes when he thinks that he can hear Elias asking him if he cares about any of them or if worrying is just a reflex, can hear his own voice asserting that none of them really like each other at all. Maybe that had been the Lonely and Peter’s influence, because saying it had struck the same soft and aching spot between his ribs that he had used for months to remind himself that it was better to stay away, but maybe it—he can’t help but wonder sometimes still if it hadn’t _entirely_ been the Lonely.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it still counts if he cares about Melanie only because he’s _decided_ to care about Melanie.

“Hi,” he says.

She clears her throat. “Daisy said—some things. About some things _you_ might have said. This afternoon.”

It’s not like Melanie to hesitate, or it doesn’t seem to be much like _this_ Melanie, the one he’s still just getting to know, who’s less angry and more daring, more like the version of her he remembers from the episodes of _Ghost Hunt UK_ he had watched and will never, ever tell Jon that he watched. It still takes Martin a moment to piece together what she’s referring to. “Daisy _heard_?” Mortification bubbles up in his stomach, before being washed away by a quick tide of indignation. “Daisy _told you_?”

“Christ,” Melanie says, “not everything. It’s not like she gave it to me word for word. I just—I think that she thought that I could maybe—you know. Relate. We don’t have to talk about it. I’d—really be very happy not talking about it. I don’t know why I even brought it up. Forget I said anything.” She’s scowling, restless fingers plucking idly at the fabric of her jeans where they’re stretched tight across her knees. Eventually she sighs, and forces her hands into stillness. “I wanted to let you know that I get it. What it feels like to—to find your way out, to just start to feel like _maybe_ you get to have a life after all of the _bullshit_ , and then to find out no, nope, the world is falling apart and no one is far enough away to be _out_.”

Martin watches her, and against his will he can feel himself relaxing the longer she speaks. “Oh.”

“Daisy shouldn’t have told me. Want me to tell her off for you?”

He considers that, weighs it. It still feels a little awful, being so _known_. It feels a little less awful, having someone take the time to tell him that he’s not—alone. He thinks that, in her rough way, Melanie is trying to offer him something like comfort, and he’s not sure he remembers the last time that anyone other than Jon had bothered. “No. She was trying to help.” Daisy. _Helping_. That still feels a little strange.

Melanie bumps her knee against his, and he doesn’t even have to think about it much before he nudges her back. “Sorry the world sucks.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He remembers Jon, standing in the middle of the fog of the Lonely. He remembers Jon from that afternoon, wreathed in fog that was only fog. _I see you. I believe you._ “We’ll just have to make it—suck less, I guess.”

She smiles. “That’s the spirit.”

**

It’s late. Undoubtedly they should all be asleep, given what they’ve resolved to do the next day, but no one seems eager to head to bed, like _not_ going will somehow forestall the inevitable. Jon steps into the kitchen. Georgie is already there. For the first time in what feels like a long time, she doesn’t look displeased to see him.

“We’re good to go,” she says. “Everything is all packed up and ready.”

A wry smile tugs at his lips. “Yes.” He taps the skin beneath his eye. “I know.”

He’s not funny. Jon knows he’s not funny, so it feels even more like an unearned gift when Georgie smiles back at him.

“What’s it like?” he asks, the words slipping out without him really meaning to say them, as foolish and impulsive as she’s ever accused him of being.

“Hmm?”

“Not—being afraid.”

Georgie contemplates his face for a long moment. “There’s no reason _to_ be afraid,” she says, voice firm enough that it seems like she intends to speak fearlessness into being, and for a moment he almost believes that she can. “We’re all going to be fine. Everyone is coming back. No one is going to do anything risky or self-sacrificing that might get them killed. _Right_ , Jon?”

It is, objectively, a terrible moment to feel helplessly fond of Georgie Barker. “Right.”

“Good.” She places her mug in the sink. There’s a pile of broken pottery shards sitting on the edge of the counter, swept up from the floor and left there like Georgie is toying with the idea of putting it back together. She brushes past him to reach the door, but then she stops, her hand on the knob. She twists around until she can look at him over her shoulder. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, hey, hold my beer and watch me play chicken with the season five premiere. (by which i mean, i will have this story done before then, so help me.)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i predictably failed my outline again for predictable reasons. this will still be done by the time the new season premieres, but i know from experience that trying to edit a 8-10k chapter makes me very sad, so i decided to split it.

The darkness at the bottom of the staircase is deep and complete.

Annabelle really does have a flare for the dramatic.

“Let’s go,” Daisy says, and starts down the stairs. Jon follows, Martin half a step behind him.

The darkness at the bottom of the staircase is deep and complete.

Annabelle really does have a flare for the dramatic.

“Let’s go,” Daisy says, and starts down the stairs. Jon follows, Martin half a step behind him.

The darkness at the bottom of the staircase is deep and complete.

Annabelle really does have a flare for the dramatic.

“Let’s go,” Daisy says.

“Stop,” Jon says.

Daisy looks at him, her foot hovering over the top step. “Jon?”

He frowns, uncertain. “I—I’m not sure. Sorry.” Daisy is silent for a long moment, but then she nods, and starts down the stairs. Jon follows, Martin half a step behind him.

The darkness at the bottom of the staircase is deep and complete.

Annabelle really does have a flare for the dramatic.

“Let’s go,” Daisy says.

_“Stop,”_ Jon says, and he feels something tear behind his eyes. It’s unpleasant, but not painful. He feels foggy in the aftermath, vision fuzzy as he tries to—.

As he tries to blow the cobwebs away.

He sighs. “I don’t think she wants me bringing company.”

Martin is staring down the staircase, his brow furrowed. “How many times did we—?”

There’s a subtle burn in Jon’s thighs and calves. He’s never been the most physically fit specimen, but even Daisy is moving a little stiffly as she shifts from one foot to the other. It’s not really possible to track time by the light of the Beholding coming through the windows, but he thinks that some amount of it must have passed. “Quite a few, I would think.”

“I don’t much care what Annabelle Cane wants,” Daisy says, the edge of a growl to her voice. “You don’t _have_ to go down there. I say you don’t, and we just let her lurk in the basement and stew until she’s ready to be reasonable.”

It’s a tempting prospect. Jon closes his eyes, just for a moment, sorting through the possibilities. “I think—I think I need to do this.”

“Is that because she wants you to think that?” Martin offers the suggestion without much conviction, but it’s a possibility worth considering.

His head is clear.

“I don't believe so.” The corner of his mouth tucks up in the vaguest of impressions of a smile. “I suppose I’ll find out.”

Daisy makes a faint, aggravated noise, but she holds the door to the basement open for him. “Yell if you need me,” she says, and Jon is left with the feeling that she would willingly pull Annabelle Cane’s head from her shoulders with her bare hands were Jon to require it. That shouldn’t comfort him, but it does.

He goes down the stairs. It’s dark. That doesn’t bother him. He can see well enough to navigate. When he reaches the bottom of the steps, he feels something brush against his face, insubstantial and clinging. He swears and flinches back reflexively. He scrapes at his cheeks, but the feeling lingers.

Deep in the dark, a woman laughs. The light flicks on while he’s still scrubbing at his mouth with his shirt sleeve. “You’re so _easy¸_ Jon.”

The narrow, high windows are clotted thick with spider’s web, which explains the darkness. The webs are thinner on the walls and in the air between them, but still thick enough to veil the space between him and Annabelle in silvery white. She’s sprawled across the top of the old boiler like it’s a throne.

Jon knows he should be afraid, but mostly he’s just tired and a little irritated. “For someone who says we’re on the same side now, you seem very eager to keep playing all your old games.”

“You’re assuming that I’m much kinder to my friends than I am to my enemies.”

“We’re not going to be friends,” Jon says, flat. “I’m not even sure that you can convince me we’re allies.” He glances around the basement. “Speaking of—where _is_ Oliver?” He feels a little tingle of guilty fear when he thinks of all of the people living above them – Georgie’s neighbors, the people Basira and Daisy had kept safe from the apocalypse, Basira’s _mother_ – who have no idea that their home is any more dangerous today than it has been at any other point since Jon ended the world. He wonders if they should have been warned. He wonders if warning them would have done much good. Most of all, he wonders if Oliver is absent because he’s otherwise occupied, entertaining himself in some terrible way. Jon wouldn’t have pegged him as the type, but his brief and probably faulty judgment of Oliver’s temperament signifies little; regardless of intent, there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as a _harmless_ avatar for one of the Entities. Not even Jon. Especially not Jon.

“He didn’t like my decorating scheme,” Annabelle says, waving a hand at the web-draped walls. Jon stares at her. She sighs. “I asked him to step out. It only seemed fair, since I was going to insist on you being all on your lonesome.” The smile she had been wearing earlier returns, small and pleased and inscrutable. “See? No games.”

That’s so transparently a lie that Jon doesn’t even bother with it. “You can’t have known that I was coming down here.”

“Can’t I have? Oh, Jon. Even if I wasn’t—let’s call it _invested_ in keeping myself informed of what you’ve been getting up to, you’re very predictable. Don’t be offended. Being predictable is what’s made you so valuable.”

Frustration robs him of his voice for a moment. She waits for him to find it again with evident amusement. “Annabelle, you—you said we were on the same side. You said you wanted to talk to me. So _talk_.”

Her eyes gleam. “Make me.”

_Make me_.

Jon’s mouth goes dry. “You knew. You knew this whole time.”

Annabelle shrugs. “Of course I knew. We all knew. The Boneturner told you that much, didn’t he? We all knew who ruled this world the moment the crown was on your head. I wanted to know if _you_ knew. I did try to tell you, in my way. I made sure the others would talk to you, made sure you were able to reach them, but you’re so _stubborn_. Predictable, but stubborn. You never seemed to ask the right questions, or you misunderstood the answers you were given. It’s almost like you didn’t _want_ to know.”

“You _manipulated_ me.”

“It’s what I do. You needn’t act so surprised. And it’s not the first time.” She leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees. “Don’t you get it yet? I’ve been with you from the very start. I told you that once. I told you that I nudged things along, to keep you safe and make sure that you did what you needed to do. Spiders in the Archives. A mysterious gift, delivered at exactly the right moment for you to forget its providence and carry it with you all through the years.” Her gaze drops, and he’s suddenly aware of the weight of the lighter in his pocket, the web pattern etched on its casing. “I even tried to warn you, didn’t I? That once you started reading a statement you wouldn’t be able to stop, that you would be at the mercy of whatever person, cruel or kind, had placed it in your unsuspecting hands, with nothing to do but hope that your curiosity and your hunger weren’t sending you hurtling toward something—heh. Unspeakable.

“Not one of my more successful gambits, I’ll admit. We both know how that one ended.” She lifts a shoulder and lets it drop, as though the end of the world is something to be shrugged off. “I wasn’t the one who picked you out, of course – back then I was still fumbling around abandoned chip shops, waiting for the Mother to get her hooks into _me_ – but it was something _like_ me.”

He swallows hard. “Mr. Spider.”

“Maybe, but the books are tricky. Powerful, to be sure, but not precisely sentient. They don’t think, or scheme, or look to the future. I’ve always suspected that it started before that, that someone – Raymond Fielding, you know about him, or one of the others – made sure that you were the beneficiary of that particular item from Jurgen Leitner’s catalogue.” She shrugs. “Or maybe not. There might’ve been some element of happenstance. Maybe you were just unlucky. But I don’t think so. You accused me of playing games, but it’s not always about that, about the pleasure of pulling the strings and watching someone dance. Sometimes it’s about playing the _long_ game.”

A shudder runs through him, and for a moment he’s not even certain why. She can’t hurt him. He knows that now. Perhaps it’s just that some fears can’t be shaken, no matter how much _control_ he supposedly now has, and this—this had been his first fear, and his last. It’s a door waiting for someone to knock on it and be invited in. It’s Elias’ words pouring out of his mouth while he opens another door, invites something worse in. _“To what end_? I—.” He stops. His throat feels raw, and his breathing has gone uneven while Annabelle speaks. “Elias said that you—that he thought you had sent him to me as some kind of blessing, that you wanted him to—is that it? Were you _trying_ to end the world?”

“No,” Annabelle says. Her voice is soft. Her gaze is almost tender. “That was the last thing I wanted. Don’t you _get it_? Elias is a fool. You were never a gift, Jon. You were meant to be preventative. You were a fail-safe. A dead man’s switch.”

The only sound in the basement is Jon’s own ragged inhale.

“You’re not the first, of course,” Annabelle says carelessly. “There was your predecessor as Archivist. There were others, not all of them bound to the Ceaseless Watcher. The Mother of Puppets has her fingers in an awful lot of pies—or tangled in an awful lot of threads, I suppose that’s more apt. Most of the rituals fail on their own, but eventually _someone_ was going to figure out the trick of it, like Gertrude did, like Elias. Someone was going to be idiotic enough to actually end the world, and _she_ didn’t want that.”

He remembers the tapes Martin had sent him, Peter saying that there were only two powers who had never attempted a ritual. The End. The Web.

Annabelle snorts. “Or maybe she did. I’ve never been quite sure, if I’m being honest. Maybe she’s as greedy and hungry as the rest of them. She certainly doesn’t seem to be suffering now. Maybe she, by her very nature, had the continuous misfortune of selecting proxies who weren’t quite ready to _stop_ playing. Maybe we meddled where she would have rather we didn’t. Maybe we were all very, very _selfish_ with our god. Free will instead of instinct, after all.” She’s smiling again, and she looks at Jon like she expects him to be equally delighted. When he doesn’t respond, she shrugs. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is that your Watcher and your _boss_ spent years trying to end the world, and we spent years making you into something,” he’s not sure what his face must be doing, but she takes one look at him and quickly corrects, “some _one_ who could _un_ end it.”

“And how,” he starts, stops, swallows again, because he hates almost every word Annabelle has spoken, but he can’t quite stop himself from asking, “do I do that?”

“That’s for you to know,” Annabelle says, “and the rest of us to find out, if you’re any kind of Archive at all. I’ve done what I can for you, so that you can now do something for me. And for the rest of humanity, if that’s what you’re into. If you’re looking the for a place to start, you might try Hill Top Road. The world has always been a little more—malleable, there, more easily convinced to shape itself into something new.” She flicks a glance over him, up and down, brief and somehow insulting. “Believe me, Jon, if I could do this myself, I would, and I wouldn’t have spent so long cultivating you.”

“Thanks.” He’s steadier now, the shudder that had gone down his spine settling in his stomach and staying there. “I don’t—.”

“You do.”

He pauses.

_Knows_.

His breath evens out, and he sounds calm when he speaks again. “You were right from the start, weren’t you?” He sounds calm and feels resigned in a way that seems more like despair. “I never had any choice.”

“Choice, choice, choice. What does that even mean? I told you about Tolstoy, didn’t I? Freedom of will only in ignorance, in not knowing the causes of one’s actions. Rather the way you existed for so long, between my interference and Elias’. Now you know. How many of the choices you made were really your own? Even the ones that felt as though they were in the moment. How many of your choices going forward will truly be _yours_ , devoid of our influence? Determinism at its finest. Tolstoy uses the example of a man deciding to lift his arm. A simple expression of will. He can lift his arm any way that he chooses. It’s only after he’s completed the act that he realizes how much external forces have influenced the action: the confines of his body and the space he’s in, the confines of time. He’s lifted his arm in the direction that felt easiest in the moment and that allowed him to avoid slamming his elbow into a wall. He can now decide _not_ to lift his arm, but that decision is influenced by the earlier moment in when he _did_ lift it, which is now in the past and immutable. _That I did not lift my arm a moment later does not prove that I could have abstained from lifting it then. And since I could make only one movement at that single moment of time, it could not have been any other._ ”

“You could have,” Jon says, “just said, _yes, I was right, free will is a lie_.”

Annabelle ignores him. “There’s something else Tolstoy says.”

“I can’t wait.”

“He says that even if, even _if_ we were to imagine a man free from external influence, dictated to only by his own will and somehow without of any motivating factor to muddy up the waters _,_ we still wouldn’t have figured out complete freedom of man. Or woman, or person, or whatever you prefer, I suppose. _For a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man._ ”

“You’re saying that my choices aren’t my own because I exist.” He snorts. “That’s an awfully convenient stance for you to take, all things considered.”

“No. God, talking to you is excruciating.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“I’m saying your choices aren’t your own because you’re _human_. I was always under the impression that human was something that you were—really disgustingly invested in being.” She slides off the top of the boiler and takes a step forward, and then another, until only a few feet of space remain between them. He thinks about telling her to stop or backing away, but he doesn’t. “I don’t see the appeal, myself, but that’s probably part of why I’m not the one in a position to remake the world in my image. Maybe choice is an illusion. Maybe you’ve never made a single choice in your entire miserable little life. Is that really what you care about?”

The cobwebs diffuse the light from the bare bulb hanging overhead, and Annabelle’s face looks softer, younger, very nearly human herself. It’s tempting to tell her to go to hell, but instead he finds himself considering his answer.

“I care about what I’ve lost,” he says, slow. Sasha. Tim. His world. Himself. “I care about—about making things right. Maybe you’re correct, and all we are is just—just a confluence of instinct and history leading inevitably to a fixed point in time, but I have to believe that what I do still matters, because I have to believe that all of that history, all of the awful things that have happened, the suffering—that I can make _that_ matter. That it can mean something at the end of the day. I have to do something with it.”

The corner of Annabelle’s mouth turns up. He expects mockery, maybe a touch of gloating now that she has him where she wants him.

It doesn’t happen. Instead she says, “So _do_ something.”

**

Daisy and Martin don’t ask him any questions, and he’s overwhelmingly grateful for that, as well as a little stunned. He’s aware that not all of the decisions he’s made have been unilateral successes, so it means something that when he says, “There’s somewhere I need to be,” Daisy just nods and goes off to—hmm, she’s hotwiring a car, out of sight but still present at the edge of his consciousness. He hadn’t been aware that was a skill she possessed. It’s actually quite nice that his friends can still surprise him. She pulls up in front of the building a few minutes later.

Oliver Banks is standing next to the front door out of the lobby when Martin and Jon walk through it. Jon’s steps slow. “Go on. I’ll catch up in a minute.” Martin looks a little dubious, and Jon pats absently at his shoulder to reassure him and because—because he can.

Oliver is twisting a cigarette between his fingers without looking at it. Without looking at anything; he’s still wearing the blindfold he’d had on when Jon had first seen him standing on the street. In the Eye’s daylight, Jon can see that it looks to be a torn up t-shirt, the fabric stained and smeared as though Oliver hasn’t taken it off in some time.

“Always hated these things,” Oliver says conversationally. “My father went through a pack and a half a day his whole life. Nearly lost his mind the one time he caught me sneaking one, but that didn’t slow him down any. Always thought that might’ve been part of what killed him.” He turns his head in Jon’s direction, a quick and reflexive and futile. “His heart. Not his lungs.”

“I know,” Jon says. “Antonio Blake, right?”

“Wasn’t sure you’d remember that one.”

“I remember all the statements. Even the ones I didn’t read. You tried to warn Gertrude.”

“Yeah. Might not’ve bothered, if I’d known then what I know now.”

“About the world?”

“About Gertrude.”

“Ah.” That’s probably fair.

“I didn’t mind warning you. Trying to? Trying to help. Or maybe not. I’ve never really been sure why I came to see you. Felt like I owed it to you, I guess. That, and Annabelle wanted me to.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

The bright flash of Oliver’s teeth when he smiles transforms his already handsome face into something nearly radiant, and again Jon is reminded with a pang of Tim. “Not as much as you’d think. I mean—I’ve had worse monsters than Annabelle running my life for years now. You know about that better than anyone, I think. At least she sometimes remembers to _ask_.”

The smile on Oliver’s lips doesn’t entirely fade, and Jon says, “You’re friends.”

“As much as Annabelle can be friends with anyone. As much as _I_ can be friends with anyone. I don’t spend a lot of time socializing these days. Or, well, I didn’t.” Oliver sighs. “I miss Netflix. Do you miss Netflix?”

“The—I, the documentaries, I suppose—.”

“Shame. Been hoping to talk to someone about Stranger Things since—uh, well before the world ended, really. Like I said: I don’t get out much.”

Jon nods at the cigarette Oliver is holding. “Do you mind?” Oliver tilts his head, and Jon’s cheeks burn, a brief surge of mortification that he would have hoped he’d be past by now. “The, uh, cigarette. I think I could use—I don’t know why I asked, I have my own—.”

Oliver shrugs. “Don’t suppose it can do you much harm, as you are now.” He offers Jon the cigarette, and Jon takes it with hands he only now realizes are shaking. It’s been a trying day. It’s not over yet. The web lighter is cold and heavy against Jon’s palm. He lights his cigarette and, with a certain amount of spiteful glee, chucks the lighter into a nearby bush.

The first inhale burns a bit, which seems a little silly when weighed against the fact that Jon’s desire to breathe seems mostly habitual rather than necessary. “Can I ask? About the, ah, blindfold?”

Another shrug. “Lots of things out there that I don’t want to see right now. I guess you know about that, too.”

The world must be covered in red for Oliver these days. It’s foolish to feel sympathetic just because he _does_ know, but Jon’s voice still comes out soft when he says, “Yes. I do.”

Daisy leans on the horn. Jon holds up a hand, the smoke curling around his fingers. _Wait_.

“If I asked you to look at me,” Jon says, “would you?”

“You don’t really have to _ask_. Do you?”

It’s true, and the thought of turning that question into a demand makes something inside of Jon shrivel. “I don’t. I am.”

Oliver turns his head to face Jon again. Jon gets the impression that he’s deliberating. After a moment, he reaches up and tugs at the blindfold until one dark, knowing eye is gazing back at Jon.

“All right,” Oliver says. He’s silent, and Jon is too, until eventually Oliver asks, “Do you—do you want me to tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there anything I _could_ tell you that would change your mind about whatever it is you’re planning on doing?”

“You know what I’m planning on doing?”

“No. I just figure there’s a reason that you asked.”

He thinks about it. He still wants to survive. He still wants to do _more_ than survive. He wants to keep the implicit promises he’s made to Georgie; he wants to watch Martin smile without seeing doubt lurking at the corners of his mouth. “Perhaps not. I—maybe.”

Oliver sighs, and tugs the blindfold back into place. “That’s about what I figured. I’d—I’d rather not, in that case, if it’s all the same to you. I’ve had enough of playing the Cassandra, you know?”

It’s foolish to feel sympathetic, but that doesn’t keep Jon from feeling it. “I know. Sorry. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And—good luck.”

“Thank you,” Jon says again. He drops the cigarette on the pavement and ends up chasing it a moment with the heel of his shoe before he manages to snub it out. “You too.”

Oliver doesn’t say anything, but he lifts his hand in a gesture that hovers awkwardly between a wave and a salute. Jon stamps at the last of the embers glowing against the concrete, and then he goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i reread tolstoy for y'all and i am full of Regret.


	9. Chapter 9

“We should have enough petrol to get there,” Daisy says. Their borrowed vehicle has satellite radio, and Daisy’s finger hovers over the power button. Jon isn’t quite fast enough to dissuade her, and he doesn’t imagine that Daisy would be dissuaded in any case. The radio flips on, and for a moment the interior of the car is filled with wet breathing, followed by screaming.

Martin looks like he’s unwillingly had his own nails dragged across a chalkboard, shoulders up and eyes wide. Daisy just sighs. “Worth a try.” She turns the radio off, and the car falls silent, no screaming other than the steady background pulse of fear inside Jon’s skull.

“Well,” Martin says, “that was awful.”

“I don’t know,” Jon says. “That’s always what popular music has sounded like to me.”

He can see Daisy roll her eyes at him in the rearview mirror. Given the way her chin is angled, this is intentional. Martin looks at him a little despairingly. Jon stares back with one eyebrow lifted until Martin huffs out a reluctant laugh. Daisy pulls out onto the road, and Jon rests his temple against Martin’s shoulder. He lets the quiet, rhythmic thrum of a car in motion lull him into something that isn’t quite sleep.

“He out?” he hears Daisy ask some time later. He thinks about rousing himself long enough to answer in the negative, but Martin’s arm is warm and solid and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

“Not sure,” Martin says. He’s holding himself very still in the back seat of the car, and there’s an ache that comes with knowing that Martin is trying to be careful of waking him, just in case he _is_ asleep. “How are you holding up?”

Daisy laughs softly. “That obvious?” Jon hears the _tok tok tok_ of her signaling a lane change, the reflex still there even if there are no other motorists to warn. “I just wish there was some way to know how they’re doing.”

Jon wants to know, too, and so he does, sudden and clear. Basira is standing in front of the Magnus Institute, hunched over so that she can peer at Georgie through the lowered car window. Someone has made another attempt at lighting the place on fire during the night. There are fresh scorch marks on the walls and a haze of smoke hanging faint and pungent in the air, and he can almost feel the distant echo of Basira’s grim, ironic amusement at the fact.

“It’s looking good,” Basira says. “I’ll make this as fast as I can, I just need to—.”

“I know,” Georgie says, quick and waspish, before breathing out sharply through her nose. “Sorry, I—sorry.” There’s a deep line between her brows, one that Jon knows means she’s unhappy because he’s provoked it often enough. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Better not,” Basira says. “If this goes right, we’ll need our getaway driver. Or if it goes wrong, for that matter.”

Georgie sighs, but there’s the ghost of a smile on her lips. “I’ll keep the engine running.”

Basira turns toward the Institute. The corners of the steps up to the front doors press against her feet through the rubber soles of her trainers like a countdown. _One, two, three, four, five_ and then her hand is on the door that Helen had opened the previous day. She half expects resistance. She doesn’t get it; the door swings open easily beneath her palm. This time, she doesn’t have to go looking for Elias. He’s already waiting for her in the gore-stained and chaotic lobby, a failed king standing in the static ruin of the last thing he’d ever had any claim at ruling.

His hair is lank and greasy, and he doesn’t look as though he’s slept. He still holds himself like he expects her to be impressed. “Good morning, Detective. I’ll admit, I didn’t anticipate that I would have the pleasure of your company so soon after your last visit.” The gun he lifts and points in her direction isn’t entirely unexpected. “That doesn’t, of course, mean that I didn’t _see_ you coming.”

Basira’s pulse goes up a tick, but it’s nothing, a physiological response to a perceived threat with no real fear beyond that initial burst. “Put the gun away, Elias.”

“Why? So you can punch me again?” He’s trying for amused, but his smile looks strained.

“Don’t think I’m not tempted.” The door is still open behind her, and she’s grateful for it. The smell of smoke is much stronger inside.

“I wouldn’t recommend it.” He gestures vaguely with the gun. “As I said, I’m far from toothless.”

“You did say that. I just don’t believe it anymore. Jon was right, wasn’t he? All than plotting, all the work you put into making Jon and me and everyone else chase our own tails trying to sniff you out, and all you are is—this. _Old man yells at cloud_ , yeah? Just a relic who still can’t admit that he was never quite as important he wanted to believe.”

“I made this world.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re having a very good time living in it.” She can see sweat beading at the edge of Elias’ hairline. “Made a lot of enemies in the past two hundred years, did you? How much longer do you think you can get away with holing up in the Institute and—what? Trying to _wait_ _out_ the end of the world?”

“What, exactly, do you want? You _didn’t_ come here to punch me.” He says it like he’s certain, and Basira supposes that he is. He’s always been good at clocking an oncoming threat. That’s why she’s here. “Are you here to ask me to assist Jon with his windmill tilting?”

“No,” Basira says. “I’m done asking you for help. I’m mostly just here to keep you busy while Melanie finishes up in the tunnels.”

“I—.” Elias sways suddenly, reaching out to catch himself against the desk that had once been Rosie’s.

The haze in the air is thicker now.

“Knew you couldn’t use your freaky Beholding powers to see her, not since she did what she did,” Basira says, “but we were a little worried that you might be able to see _fire_.”

“I _sealed_ the tunnels.”

“Yeah. Lucky for us, we know someone who’s pretty good at making doors where there aren’t supposed to be any.”

Elias is coughing, choking, even though the smoke up here is barely thick enough to tickle at the back of Basira’s throat.

“You’ve got that fancy CO2 system, of course,” Basira says, “but I doubt you let whoever installed it go poking about down in what’s left of Milbank. The Institute might survive, but I don’t really see that happening. Hard for a place to stay standing once its foundations are gone. Regardless, I doubt you’ve got much time before the fire reaches your body. I’m sort of surprised it’s taken this long. Would’ve expected Melanie to dowse you with a whole jerry can of kerosene, just to make sure. She—she _really_ does not like you.”

“Very daring of you to tell me all this,” Elias says, “given the fate of the last woman who came to gloat over how she was going to burn down my Institute.” He gestures with the gun again. This time, his hand isn’t so steady.

“Sure,” Basira says levelly, “but we both know that gun isn’t loaded. Hasn’t been for a while now. Like I said, you’ve got enemies. You ran out of bullets weeks ago.” She says it like she’s certain, because she is.

There are little shudders running up and down Elias’ body, one after another, as though he’s suddenly found himself in the throes of a fever. Basira wonders if the desiccated flesh of a two-hundred-year-old not-quite-corpse still has nerve endings, if Elias can feel the heat of the fire below. She’s sure she should feel bad about that, but she thinks about the lives Jonah has spent to extend his own over the years and thinks that she’ll sleep just fine.

Elias drops the gun. He’s no longer leaning against Rosie’s desk; he’s clutching it, using it to keep himself on his feet. “All this to kill me. Really, Basira, I’m almost flattered.”

“Not really. We talked about it. All of us. Decided that it was worth it, to see the Archives gone and make sure that you can’t do any more harm. Maybe destroying this place will help, and maybe it won’t, but at the very least I don’t think it can hurt. Killing you was—well, Melanie will rest a little easier, I guess. Jon, too. But that’s all. I told you, Elias: you just not that important.”

“It can hurt.” Elias’ legs go out from under him, and for a moment he just lies there on the cold marble floor, panting. Basira waits. He lifts his head far enough to peer at out from beneath the tangled shadow of his hair with one narrowed, malicious eye. “It can hurt _you._ ”

Melanie is out of it, and Georgie had never been in. Martin and Daisy are or have been too much claimed by other powers for their employment contracts to still bind them. Yesterday’s display had shown that Jon is well outside of Elias’ control. So it’s just her. Basira had known that going in. “Maybe. We’ll find out. Or, well, I will.”

She leaves him there.

Basira has just reached the bottom of the steps when Jon feels Jonah Magnus die. Basira feels it too; he can tell by the way that she stumbles and nearly falls. He makes a faint sound without meaning too. Distantly, he feels Martin’s fingers, pressing lightly against his brow. “Jon?”

Georgie is out of the car in a flash, her hands gripping at Basira’s arms to steady her.

“I’m all right,” Basira says, and Jon breathes a sigh of relief. “I’m good. Any sign of Melanie?”

“Not yet,” Georgie says. She turns to look at a nearby manhole cover. It’s bright yellow. Jon reluctantly has to give Helen points for creativity and style. “I’m going in after her. Help me move this.”

Basira sort of has to admire Georgie. She thinks things through, makes plans, calculates the risks, but once she’s decided on a course of action she’s committed to it, with no doubt and no fear. Sometimes Basira thinks that things at the Archives might’ve gone smoother, if it had been Georgie leading the charge rather than her or Jon. “Do you want me to—.”

“Someone has to drive the getaway car.”

They drag the manhole cover out of the pavement, and Georgie is gone in a flash. Basira settles back on her heels to wait, but she doesn’t have to wait for long: the top of Georgie’s head has barely disappeared from sight when a hand reappears at the edge of the manhole, soot-streaked and greasy. Basira wraps her hands around Melanie’s wrist, and pulls them both coughing onto the street.

“So, turns out that kerosene goes up _really_ fast—.”

Melanie’s voice is choked and rough, but the smile on her lips is bright against her blackened cheeks and proud. Georgie makes a sound that sounds like a sob and buries her face is Melanie’s filthy shoulder, and it’s a little amazing how much love and relief can look like terror.

For a moment, none of them notice Helen eeling out of from beneath the ground behind them. Melanie and Georgie are covered in soot and sweat and worse, but Helen is spotless. Her shoulder blades are strange, sharp little peaks along her back and her nails dig into the ground. “That was exciting,” she says, delighted, but Basira doesn’t miss the way that she hovers above Georgie and Melanie once she finds her feet from wherever she had temporarily misplaced them. Her spine distorts and stretches until she’s arched over them, insubstantial as a nightmare and uncomfortable to look at, but with something fretful about the way her too-long fingers twist together and something protective about the way her shoulders fan out and curve, like she’ll shield them from the glaring light of the Eye up above.

There’s a soft roar of heat against Basira’s cheeks as the fire eats its way across the ground floor of the Institute. One of the front windows cracks, then shatters out. She can feel the hundreds of thousands of statements in the Archives burning below them, and Jon can too. He can feel more than that: he can feel the way beheld world shifts and readjusts, off balance as it accommodates that loss. For just a moment, the space behind his eyes tilts.

“They’re fine,” he says. His own voice sounds too-loud and harsh. “I think—I think we should hurry, though.”

“Going about as fast as I can,” Daisy says.

Miles behind them, Helen tilts her head. It would be _birdlike_ , if the average bird had no bones. “Oh. Excuse me. I think the Archivist has need of me.”

Jon opens his eyes.

The road stretches out ahead of them, studded with stopped cars that Daisy is having to navigate around. In the next lane is a truck, its back panel pushed up and its ramp down. The inside of the trailer empty; Jon chooses to believe that someone, perhaps the driver, had taken the time to loot whatever the truck had been hauling in the wake of the world ending, although he’s aware that, given the world they’re living in, the real explanation is probably something more disturbing. As Jon watches, the blue-on-white logo on the side of the truck fades away, blotted out by yellow.

He has to give Helen points for creativity and style.

“Daisy.”

“I see it.” She jerks the wheel, and they’re sliding up the ramp. Jon bounces against Martin’s shoulder as they lurch off the ramp and into the trailer, and then the wheels and his stomach both drop. He closes his eyes.

When he dares to open them again, it’s no longer the A40 stretched out in front of them but a little residential street, neat houses lining either side of the road. Most of the houses are not in good condition: the one closest to Jon is a mass of pinprick woodworm holes so dense that he can barely believe it’s still standing, and up the street is what he at first believes is an empty lot, the house demolished, until he sees the corner of a roof and a gutter peeking un from beneath the smooth, dry soil. Jon turns his head and, past Martin’s shoulder, Jon can see it: 105 Hill Top Road.

He’s not surprised to find it unscathed.

Martin is watching at the house too. He’s frowning a little, and it takes Jon a moment to remember that Martin has never been here before, that he would know the house from the statements and his follow-up research but, unlike the rest of them, wouldn’t have ever actually laid eyes on it. Daisy shifts in the front seat and says, “That’s—hmm. Not great. Unless a burnt-out husk is what you were hoping for.”

There’s plenty of destruction around them, but none of the nearby houses appear to be burned. “What?”

Daisy looks confused. Martin looks concerned. With a growing feeling of weary acceptance, Jon looks back at the house. It looks the same as it had in the first moment he had seen it, the same as it had when they had come here trying to find Annabelle Cane so many months ago. Then he blinks, and the house in front of him is scorched and blackened, three and a half walls and no roof. He closes his eyes and opens them again. A different house, older, weathered brickwork and elaborate windows. Again. The substructure and raw wood frame of new construction, plastic sheets flapping in the wind.

_Malleable_ , Annabelle had called the house on Hill Top Road. Maybe that has always been true – he remembers Anya Villette’s statement – but the apocalypse certainly seems to have inspired it to new extremes.

“And all you see a burned down house?” At Martin’s nod, Jon pushes open the car door and shoves his legs out, the toes of his shoes scraping against the sidewalk briefly before he manages to scoot far enough across the seat to stand. “I’m going to try something.”

“Jon, wait.”

He almost doesn’t, but he remembers a little too well Georgie’s scolding. He stops while Martin unfolds himself from the back seat and Daisy comes around the bumper, and they approach 105 Hill Top Road together.

The doorknob on the front door is cool beneath his fingers, and it turns easily. “You’re really not seeing this?” He can still glimpse those other versions of Hill Top, if he tries, superimposed over the building he knows is there, but even he can’t say which one is the real one. Perhaps Martin and Daisy are right, and the house at Hill Top Road has been reduced to cinder and ash for a second and final time. Maybe they’re all equally real, different times and the same place all bleeding into each other.

He pulls open the door and steps through, although he doesn’t go far. When he returns to the front stoop, Daisy shakes her head. “Gone. Just gone. We tried to follow you in through the—well, the place where the a door used to be, but it’s just a burned out building. Wouldn’t want to do too much poking around. Floor didn’t look stable.”

She doesn’t sound surprised, which is probably a testament to how strange their lives had been even before the world had ended. They try a few different combinations, but nothing changes the outcome: Jon is the only one able to enter that phantom house.

“I don’t like that this is becoming the routine,” Martin says, but on his face and Daisy’s Jon can read the same resignation he feels.

“Good luck,” Daisy says, and hugs him too hard. She always hugs a little too hard, always loosens her arms guiltily right before letting him go, as though she’s suddenly remembered that neither of them have positive associations with being held so tight that there’s not enough room to breathe. He’s barely accepted the small torch she pulls out of her jacket pocket for him and turned away from her before he finds himself caught up in Martin’s arms. Martin doesn’t hug too hard – if anything, he’s exceedingly gentle, self-conscious of his size and the amount of space he takes up – but he’s thorough, and Jon always feels—enveloped. Contained, even on the days when it seems like his own skin isn’t enough to hold in everything living inside of him. _Safe_.

Jon presses his face into the body-warm wool of Martin’s jumper, breathes in deep, and steps away. He thinks about saying _I’ll be back soon_ , but he’s not sure if any part of that will turn out to be true, and he doesn’t think he’d forgive himself if the last thing he said to them turned out to be a lie.

“I’ll try to make this fast,” he says instead. His conversation with Oliver Banks has made him uncertain, but he does still intend to survive this, to not just fix the world but to have another chance to live in it. He’ll hold on to that.

The house is still and quiet. It almost feels wrong, given everything he knows has happened here. Raymond Fielding. Ivo Lensik. Agnes Montague. Father Burroughs. Anya Villette. Even Helen had tried to lure a victim here, and it had served as Annabelle’s lair for who knew how long. (He could know. He doesn’t try.)

He lets instinct guide him through the silent halls until he finds himself standing in front of the door he knows leads to a basement, for the second time that day. He eyes it with ill-favor. “Why must the unspeakable secrets always be stored in the basement?” he murmurs to no one, before pulling the door open and beginning his descent. “Why is it never the attic, or the kitchen?”

He flips on the torch Daisy had given him. The cobwebs he remembers from his last visit are gone. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and sweeps the beam of his torch out across then basement. Then he stops, abruptly enough to make his ankles ache.

There’s a tape recorder on the floor. Beside it is another one, and another, and another, covering the basement floor in a carpet of black and silver plastic so dense that Jon is uncertain there would be room to walk between them.

It occurs to him that he’s barely seen a tape recorder since leaving Scotland, other than the one that had ended up packed into his untouched bag of statements. He supposes this explains where they’d all taken themselves off to.

He doesn’t feel scared. He barely feels surprised, as though this is what he had always expected to find in this basement and as though some part of him had always expected to end up here. That isn’t exactly a comfort, given the source of all of his unnatural knowledge, but then he takes a step closer to the nearest of the tape recorders and feels his stomach pitch. It’s unpleasant. It’s reassuring. He remembers what it had felt like to reach for the tape containing Eric Delano’s statement.

He sits down on the bottom step of the stairs and folds his hands. He’s having some difficulty tracking time; he doesn’t know how _long_ he sits there, looking at the tape recorders as though looking will be enough to pry their secrets from them.

“Was I being uncharitable with you, then?” he murmurs, and he can’t even summon the energy to feel foolish about chatting to the tape recorders as though they’re alive. They might not be sentient, but they’re also not entirely inanimate. “The last time we talked, I asked you what you wanted. What it was you needed to hear. Everyone is always telling me that I ask the wrong questions.” He twists his fingers together restlessly, then forces them still. Considers. “Fine. What do you want _me_ to hear?”

_Click_.

_“There was one tune that, when I was a child, I always insisted he play to me.”_ It’s a woman’s voice, high and clear, and it takes him a moment to realize why that voice strikes his ear as wrong. _“He never told me its name, if it even had one. I always used to just call “Faster, Faster” by way of a description. A cheery, upbeat circus melody that started out almost unbearably slow and gathered in tempo, getting faster and faster until my grandpa’s fingers were a blur. He always indulged me when I asked him to play it, and now I played it for him.”_

“That’s Leanne Denikin’s statement,” Jon says into the silence after the recorder shuts off. “But— _I_ recorded that statement, there’s no way—.”

_Click click click click click click click._

_“...had been a man of discipline, in many ways harsh, but he loved me and my sister very much, and...”_

_“...always used to roll my eyes at people who said that their loved ones completed them, but I honestly can’t think of any other way to describe how it felt to be with Evan.”_

_“I thought of her face, the smell of her perfume, the long rambling phone calls made whenever we got the...”_

More voices, talking over each other, blending together, but Jon can hear each of them clearly. Sometimes they’re the voices of strangers, speaking words that he _knows_ he or Martin or Gertrude had recorded. Sometimes they’re more familiar.

_“I think a lot of people in my situation would have been jealous, but not me,”_ Tim says, quiet and warm as he had so rarely been toward the end. _“I was just proud of him.”_

_“...those were some of the happiest years of my childhood. I’d lost my mother, but my father doted on me, and together it seemed like...”_

_“...had a skipping rope, bright green, old and ratty. I made my mum buy it for me at a car boot sale, and I loved it."_

_“Ah, screw it.”_ The bang of a door opening and closing briefly cuts through the rest of the recordings, and Jon _remembers_ that, remembers Sasha saying that right before she had gone charging off to save Tim from Jane Prentiss, but the voice on the recording is not Sasha’s.

_Click click click click._

_“You don’t realise how big a bed can be until something like that happens.”_

_“...might even have been_ in _love with him; it’s hard to say. When there are so many emotions caught up in a single person, when they’re such a significant force in your life, it gets difficult to say what’s really there at the heart of it.”_

_“I’d looked after Toby since he was born. I’d helped birth him. He was my friend.”_

_“You_ believe _me, then?”_ Helen. That one’s Helen, as she had been once, her voice undistorted by anything other than tears and fear, but also tinged with relief and gratitude.

_“...last hour was one of the happiest I’d ever spent with my son. In the sunlight...”_

_“...whole time, I expected the music to reach me, to take me, to seize my heart with murderous purpose. But it never...”_

_Click click click._

_“...never had much patience for my faith, but perhaps it will provide you some small peace knowing I face my death gladly, knowing I have done my duty before God.”_

_“Now there’s only one thing I have left that I value. That I love. And I cannot lose him. I can’t lose Ethan.”_

_“...mum and me...”_

_“...tried to reply, to explain, but all I could manage to say to get through the shaking sobs was, ‘_ I love you _.’”_

_Click_.

The recorders turn off as one, leaving Jon in a silence so complete that he feels momentarily dizzy. The silence doesn’t last for long. _Click_. _“No. There aren’t any god-like powers of hope, or love,”_ Gerry says, before that tape recorder goes silent and another one switches on, Martin’s voice fitting so neatly into the space left behind by Gerry’s that it sounds like he’s completing a thought, rather than stringing two disparate moments in time together. _“I think our experience of the universe has value.”_

“Oh,” Jon says. He—understands, and it’s not the Beholding feeding him information, not this time. He just _understands_. He reaches out to touch one of the tape recorders with his finger almost reverently, and he thinks about taking the time to wonder what they are, if they’d ever been a part of the Beholding at all or if—.

Now is not the time. The Magnus Institute and the man who had built it are gone, and the new world they had served as the foundation for is off balance. _Malleable_. Open to change. If Jon is going to try something, he needs to do it now.

Not just an Archivist, but an Archive. A living chronicle of terror. But fear isn’t the only thing he’s archived. There is no god of love or hope for him to feed, but that doesn’t mean the records aren’t there, contained inside of him alongside all of the horror and misery that the Beholding and Elias had required.

He understands. He knows, now, what he needs to do, and how he’s going to do it.

He’s been able to feel the whole world’s fear for months now. He takes a deep breath, and he lets himself feel it, _all_ of it. All of those people, trembling and afraid. The fears, Smirke’s Fourteen or Elias’ many-in-one, whatever it was he had let through the door, engorged and satisfied after so long spent glutting themselves on terror. He’s the Archive, and within him is contained the world.

He can’t put them back. The door is open now; there’s no closing it. But he’s not just an Archive, he's an Archivist, _the_ Archivist, and he’d spent long hours trying to restore order to Gertrude’s disaster of an archive, trying to categorize and define and _understand_.

Carefully, methodically, the Archivist begins to rip all of that fear to pieces. Small. Digestible. Something that can be easily contained and filed away, and he _knows_ where all of that stolen fear belongs. To whom it belongs.

It’s habit alone that makes the Archivist reach first for Martin. Martin has always had more room inside of him for fear, but he’s also always had more of the rest of it, too: ragged hope and the dogged determination to care even for things that are unlovely. The Archivist folds the first piece of fear down until it’s something small and manageable, with edges smooth enough not to sting, because in an abstracted kind of way he’s convinced that this should not be something that hurts. Then he slides that fear into place inside Martin’s ribcage, beneath the steady beat of his heart, where it was always meant to live.

Martin’s breath catches and the steady beat of his heart picks up speed, but only a handful of seconds before heart and breathing both even out as he adjusts. The Archivist smiles, content, and with proof of concept established, he does it again, and again, and again.

Some of them have more room inside of them than others. He fills Daisy’s belly full with fear until he feels certain that she’ll never know hunger again. Helen is a pleasant surprise. By her own admission, he wouldn’t have thought her human enough still to suit, but she’s idly brushing bits of ash and debris out of Georgie’s tangled curls with too-long fingers while Melanie sprawls on the pavement and laughs, and to the Archivist’s all-seeing eyes that looks close enough to love to count. Georgie he can’t do much with; she’s been cut off from her own fear for years, even if everything else about her is achingly human.

He can feel them all. There’s a retired postal worker in Seneca, Nebraska who had turned into a bit of a survivalist after retirement; she had spent her pension on cases of food and potable water meant to help her wait out the end of the world, but when the day had come she hadn’t quite been able to convince herself to close her reinforced front door on her neighbors. There are twenty people shoved into her two bedroom split-level, and he knows them all, their fear, but also their hope, their love, their resolve and their foolish human foibles. A tour guide in Mandawa. A delivery driver from Hasselt. A—.

The Archivist is forced to confront the fact that he is very quickly running out of places to store fear. They’re months into the apocalypse, and the apocalypse has not been kind to anyone. There are, quite simply, not enough people. There aren’t even enough pigs and cows.

The ruined world is malleable, and he is its king. Within him is contained the world.

He can’t close the door. He can’t undo the world’s end. In the moment, however, it feels very simple to undo some of the damage done.

There was a mother of two stuck in her car in Suffolk. He remembers her. She’s been dead for weeks. She had died with water clogging her throat; she had died thinking of her children, loving them, throat tight with the knowledge that she would never see them again. There is a mother of two in her car in Suffolk. She is not drowning. She has never drowned, because this is the her that had existed before the Buried had found her. She’s like the house on Hill Top Road; he can reach all the different versions of her, and he selects the one who is alive. It’s easy to pour a careful measure of fear down her throat, until it’s nestled close and comfortable next to her love for her children. Love and fear in equal measure, right where they belong: inside something living, something human.

Proof of concept established, he does it again, and again, and again.

The Beholding watches it all, watches even as he starts to tear pieces from it. It’s too much what it is to look away, even when the destruction it’s drinking in is its own, like a snake swallowing its own tail. Then it’s gone, and the world is made new. Again.

The Archivist feels satisfied in the aftermath. He feels hollowed out. He feels—maybe a little lightheaded. Hungry, for the first time in months. No, not just hungry. Starving. _Oh_.

He’d known he was forgetting something. He hopes that Martin and the others aren’t too upset with him, when they find out.

The world is made new, and then the Archivist’s world goes dark.

**

“You did say,” Annabelle says, “that you wanted an end. The Archivist saved the world with the power of love. The end.” She makes a sour face. “A little trite, I have to admit, but—.”

“I like it,” Oliver decides.

Annabelle rolls her eyes. “Soft,” she says, but she says it without quite as much disapproval as he would have expected. She looks at him, and her expression is thoughtful. “How do you feel?”

“The same way you do, I’m guessing.” She keeps looking at him, and Oliver shrugs. “There was—did I ever tell you about the first time I touched a corpse?” Abnormal dinner conversation for anyone else, but Annabelle doesn’t even raise a brow. “I felt—death, I suppose. Its patience, the quiet of places where nothing living had ever breathed, the way that every passing second brought me closer to my own, and I was afraid, but I also liked it. I feel like that, but now I also feel like it—like it’s _mine_.”

“Yes,” Annabelle says. She smiles, and her smile is unbearably smug, but if she really did have any part in making this happen then Oliver sort of can't blame her. “That’s exactly how I feel. Like everything the Mother of Puppets was, everything she gave me, is all coiled up inside me now. I expect the Archivist did it to keep his pet monsters fed rather than to benefit the rest of us, but I’m not complaining.”

Oliver considers her. “And will you feed her? Or—I don’t know, what’s left of her.”

“I don’t think I have to anymore, but maybe in a few years I’ll decide that the Mother can have a little fear. As a treat.” She’s silent a moment, and then adds helpfully, “It’s a meme.”

“I _know_ it’s a meme, Annabelle.” Oliver shakes his head. “What do you think Jon will have to say about that?”

“Not much. I told you: the Archivist is dead.”

She says it carefully, without breaking eye contact. Oliver thinks about that, and he thinks about what he’d seen: the red veins twisted together like a crown, hovering over Jonathan Sims’ head.

He decides not to ask any more questions.

Annabelle stands, and stretches her arms slow and languorous above her head, curved like a dancer. For just a moment, it looks like she has more than two of them. She looks at him. “Are you coming?”

“Just a minute. You go. I’ll catch up.”

Annabelle nods, and Oliver waits until she’s gone before getting up. The group of teenagers goes silent as he approaches, other than some giggling and the denim-on-vinyl scrape of the phone number’s owner trying to disappear beneath the edge of the table. Oliver ignores that, choosing instead to focus on the girl with the knot of red pulsing behind her ribs. She looks at him curiously.

“You’ve been getting pain in your stomach. Maybe your back. Been feeling tired, too, right?” he asks, soft and serious.

Now she looks nervous. “I— _what_?”

“You should see a doctor. Soon.”

He leaves without giving her a chance to respond.

It’s never worked before. It might not work this time, but maybe the rules are different now. Oliver finds himself smiling as he pushes open the door to the restaurant and steps out into a world born new.

**

“Jon?”

His head hurts.

“Is he—.”

_“Jon,”_ Martin says, and there’s something soft and achingly desperate to the way he says the name, something that calls to—

The sensation of Martin slapping him across the face is, unfortunately, not an unfamiliar one.

—the Archivist, but—

“Martin, come on. We’ve all had the impulse, but I really don’t think that _hitting_ him is going to help.”

—no. Not the Archivist. There is no Archivist. Not anymore.

Jon breathes deep, lungs burning for air, and opens his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woof, so that's this story and this series both done. Big, huge thanks to everyone who's commented and kudos'd. Story and series title continue to be from Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here," and if you'd like to scream about TMA with me, I'm on [Tumblr](https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/).


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